Date: 3 Mar 95 From: more@newsmaster.tgc.com To: ganswijk@xs4all.nl Subject: 5205 Intel/Hewlett-Packard P7 Chip Due by 1997 Feb. 28 Intel/Hewlett-Packard P7 Chip Due by 1997 Feb. 28 NEWS BRIEFS HPCwire ============================================================================= San Francisco, Calif. -- The alliance Intel Corporation and Hewlett-Packard Company formed last year to design a future generation computer processing architecture will show fruit in 1997 in the P7 chip, Intel's Chief Operating Officer Craig Barrett said. Intel's COO told a reporter from Reuters News Service that engineering teams from the two companies joined up last summer to work on a P7 design. That collaboration is underway while a team of Intel-only engineers complete development of the P6 which Intel expects to ship to manufacturers this year. Speaking at the Robertson, Stephens & Co. technology conference, Barrett would not discuss the architectural direction of the P7 work beyond saying, "I think there will be a lot of innovation in the P7." During a speech before the Robertson Stephens audience, Barrett reiterated its aim -- described by other Intel executives on other occasions -- that central processors carry out more of the functions of a computer now handled by add-in processing devices. Barrett explained that the typical multimedia computer of today has 16 different add-in cards and communications links for separate processing of video, audio and modem communications capabilities. He said an old argument of not assigning peripheral processing to the core processor was that it would eat up too much of the microprocessor's capacity. "Well, the P6 will have 250 MIPS (millions of instructions per second) processing. That is lots and lots of processing power," Barrett added. Those 250 MIPS are about twice the processing power of the Pentium chip, Intel's top of the line microprocessor. He expects some computers built with P6 processors will handle part of the processing now done by peripheral devices and P7-based computers will likely continue that trend. Computer manufacturers will ultimately decide whether or not central processors will handle what is now managed by separate add-in cards and modems. Another feature of processing architecture Barrett spoke of as likely in the future is standardization of various sizes of computers on one architecture. "In the future, you'll see the same basic computer architecture all the way from the PC (personal computer), to servers and massively parallel processing computers," Reuters quoted him as saying. Barrett did not specify that one aim of the P7 is to make it usable for large parallel processing computers as well as on PCs, but he did say that scalability was both an Intel aim and an industry trend. ***************************************************************************** H P C w i r e S P O N S O R S Product specifications and company information in this section are available to both subscribers and non-subscribers. *912) Avalon Computer 915) Genias Software *905) Maximum Strategy *921) Cray Research Inc. 930) HNSX Supercomputers 906) nCUBE 907) Digital Equipment. 902) IBM Corp. 932) Portland Group 909) Fujitsu American 904) Intel Corp. 935) Silicon Graphics 916) MasPar Computer 931) Sony Corporation *Updated information within last 30 days ***************************************************************************** Copyright 1995 HPCwire.