Intel, AMD set to unveil new chips

SAN FRANCISCO: Intel Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices, fierce rivals in

the market for microprocessors, are expected on Monday to announce their

fastest-ever chips, analysts said, continuing the pair's long rivalry.

Advanced Micro Devices will debut its Athlon XP 2000+, which runs at 1.67

gigahertz, or 1.67 billion cycles a second, while Intel will unveil its new

Pentium 4 chip running at 2.2 gigahertz, analysts said.

Currently, Intel's fastest chip is the Pentium 4 running at 2 gigahertz, and

Advanced Micro's is its Athlon XP1900+, which runs at 1.6 gigahertz. Last year,

AMD briefly claimed the fastest running chip, although Intel has since pulled

ahead and is likely to stay there.

Analysts said that while the chips' improvements are important, the new

processors, the primary computing engines of personal computers, are also the

latest chapter in a long race.

"I think it'll be viewed as positive news in general," said Needham

& Co. analyst Dan Scovel. "The good news is both companies are

continuing to execute, they are delivering, they are making advances."

Intel's Pentium 4 chip marks its biggest move yet into making chips with

smaller geometries. Currently, Intel's Pentium 4 chip has components that are as

little as 0.18 microns wide. With the chips being announced on Monday, those

dimensions will shrink to as little as 0.13 microns.

"What's new and interesting here is Intel is now moving the Pentium 4

into 0.13, which is a necessity in terms of die size and costs," Scovel

said, referring to the size of the chip itself.

"The Pentium 4 in round numbers has about twice as many transistors as

the Pentium III," Scovel said. "This, in my opinion, gets the die size

down to where it probably should have been when it was first introduced."

The smaller line widths on the chips mean they cost less to produce, because

more chips can be manufactured from a single wafer. It also boosts performance,

because more transistors can be packed into a single processor.

AMD late last year revamped the branding strategy for its processors, naming

them Athlon XP 1700, 1800, 1900, and, now, 2000, to refer to what it said was

the overall performance of the individual processor. It was also an effort to

try and move consumers away from focusing on the clock speed of the chip, which,

in microprocessors, is now measured in gigahertz.

(C) Reuters Limited.