Intel, AMD, IBM detail 64- bit processor designs

Two years ago, Intel was talking about its IA-64 Merced

processor promising a blazing speed of around 650 MHz. At the time, high-end

processors were running at 266 MHz. By the time the Merced, now called Itanium,

hits the market in mid-to-late 2000, 650MHz would make it the slowest high-end

processors then available.

With Advanced Micro Devices shipping 700MHz processors today,

and Apple’s G4 PowerMacs crunching upward of 1 billion floating point

calculations, Intel will be forced to come up with something better for the

Itanium to stand out. At this week’s Microprocessor Forum in Silicon Valley,

Intel and AMD engineers unveiled details of their next series of chips,

including the promise by Intel that the Itanium will be capable of making 6

billion floating point calculations per second. That points to a clock speed of

around 900-1000 MHz AMD, meanwhile, acknowledged that it is working on a new

64-bit architecture for a future "K8" processor developed under the

ominous-sounding code-name "Sledgehammer."

The chip will have an all new "x86-64" instruction

set that essentially extends the current 32-bit architecture, and thus assures

that the new 64-processor will run all existing 32-bit software applications.

While AMD appears to see market opportunities for 64-bit

processors in the general desktop market, Intel is targeting the Itanium

processor at the server market. Intel believes the demand for servers that will

power Internet sites and services will be huge.

Most attendees at the event were severely disappointed about

the lack of detailed information Intel revealed about the Itanium. Perhaps the

most impressive showing at the Microprocessor Forum, was a potential strong

competitor for the Itanium in the server chip market. The so-called Power4

processor under development at IBM is copper-based and will power future IBM

AS/400 minicomputers and RS/6000 workstations that will be launched in the

second half of 2001. The Power4 uses a seven-layer copper architecture and will

contain 170 million transistors. The chips will process data at speeds greater

than one GHz, said Power4 chief architect Jim Kahle.

The Power4 represents a potentially troubling competitor for

Intel. The Power4 was designed to compete with a second-generation IA-64

processor being developed by Intel under the code-name McKinley. But because

Intel has fallen almost two years behind in bringing the Itanium to market, IBM

may have a huge headstart over the McKinley which is not expected until 2003.