Intel ready with Rambus chipset

After much delay, Intel is apparently set to launch the much-awaited 820 chipset in the next two weeks, according to Intel chief executive Craig Barrett who also said he who also indicated Intel’s much-delayed Merced chip will be launched next year with speeds of around 1 gigahertz. The new 820 chip set uses the Rambus memory chip technology, which is better suited to work with high-speed microprocessors than the current generation of DRAM chips.

Just a month ago, Intel announced that its engineers had discovered a design flaw that exposed computers with more than three expansion slots to errors. "We do plan to formally introduce the 820 chipset supporting Rambus technology within the next couple of weeks," said Barrett. The 820 set follows the 840 set, which is already in production and is aimed at workstations and servers. Meanwhile, Barrett said Intel will continue to increase the performance of the new line of Coppermine Pentium III and Xeon chips. An 800 MHz version should be available in the first half of next year. That is up from the current top-of-the-line 733 MHz. The Merced chips, slated for the second half of 2000 will sport speeds in excess of 1 GHz, Barrett aid.

Barrett also commented that he was "surprised'' that Japan’s Toshiba has agreed to pay $1.2 billion in what appears a largely frivolous lawsuit over an alleged defective floppy disk controllers. "I am surprised firstly at the lawsuit and secondly at the settlement. In my understanding no one was harmed and no one was damaged by any corruption of data or any other problems.''

Meanwhile, Intel chairman Andrew said this week at an investor conference in san Francisco that the Internet is causing a massive upheaval that is causing every company to overhaul is strategies in order to compete in the future. "Change may be constant, but the rate of change isn't constant, it is accelerating. I have never experienced a period of time where the rate of change is as high as today. Change may be constant, but the Net is the mother of all inflection points. The sooner you can race, and the sooner you can change your business plan, the more likely you are to ride change up instead of down.''

The Internet will be especially challenging for large and well established companies, but their size and brand name will also help them establish themselves as big enterprises in the online economy. "Large companies will be urged to take pretty aggressive action and race to re-engineer their business practices to take advantage of the Net. Very few small companies will make it into the big time. I see more of the same in a different medium; the players will not change all that much.'' Asked if new alternative chip technologies, such as molecular-level circuit design, could overtake the current silicon-based chip industry,

Groove said he doesn’t foresee a massive change in the near future. These development are very, very interesting, but in the very, very early stage. When discoveries come, for every one that's important, there are 10 that come and disappear. There is at least a10-15 years of life left in the current technology. It's unlikely any disruptive force could be economically viable as an alternative to silicon in the next 10 or 15 years."