OL1.AUG– –RM
Turmoil ahead
Microprocessor wars and competing operating systems spell uncertainty for
product designers
The personal computer industry appears headed for turmoil different from
last year's. Then, the turmoil was mostly severe price competition. This
time, it's more: increasing diversity of microprocessors and competing
operating systems.
As the Intel x86 architecture wends its litigious way into the future,
RISC processors swarm like mosquitoes around an elephant, seeking to turn
a profit at greater volumes than the workstation market ever affords. New
and newly enhanced operating systems may give them a chance, by reducing
dependence on the 386 instruction-set architecture.
Microprocessor wars Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, CA) will not willingly
abdicate its dominance in the 486 microprocessor market as long as it can
maintain the margins that have made so much money recently. It has added
power-saving features of the 486SL to all its 486 processors, keeping
prices steady. The company calls these processors the SL Enhanced 486
family. The enhancements include a static core, allowing a zero-clock
sleep mode, a system management mode, and an auto-idle that slows the
internal clock when waiting for memory or I/O cycles. Sleep mode reduces
supply current to 0.2 mA, dropping power from 4 W to 1 W. For notebooks,
Intel has two 3.3-V processors, the 33-MHz 486SL in which the enhancements
first appeared, and a 20/40-MHz 486DX/2. Industry betting is that as long
as the money is rolling for the 486, not much fab capacity will be diverted
to the Pentium. Intel is also active on the litigation front. The twists
and turns of its various suits against Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
(Sunnyvale, CA) provide entertainment, but the suits have not halted
production of AMD 486 chips, either those with Intel or cleanroom
microcode. These include a plastic-packaged 3.3-V 33-MHz Am486SX in a
plastic quad flatpack for $185 ea/1,000. Cyrix Corp. (Richardson, TX) has
added 40- and 50-MHz clock-doubling processors, called 486S2, that fit
486SX sockets, along with separate math coprocessors. These also feature
power-down and system-management mode. The math coprocessor fits an 80-pin
socket. The top of the Cyrix line, the Cx486S2-50, with companion
coprocessor, costs $229 ea/1,000. The bottom, a Cx486S-33 or a 3.3-V
Cx486S-V25, is $139 ea/1,000. Cyrix chips are not direct clones of Intel
processors, and comparisons are difficult. The company does not have AMD's
direct legal problems with Intel, but Intel is attempting to collect
royalties from users of Cyrix chips. Cyrix plans to integrate the
floating-point processor in a future chip with 486DX pinout. The wild
card in 486 supply is IBM, which has the uncontested right to make and
sell 486 chips. IBM has offered other previously internal products to the
market, and has shown increasing consciousness of other possibilities. It
is rumored to be readying a DX3 version that would run 99 MHz internally
in a 33-MHz socket. A 120-MHz DX4 version is perhaps not beyond the
company's capability next year.
Operating systems New operating systems may make Intel architecture not
quite as unavoidable as it is now. Windows NT may be shipping by the time
this issue of Electronic Products appears, and it treats Mips Computer and
Intel architectures equally. Windows NT for Digital's Alpha architecture
should be close behind. What's more, a port to the IBM/Motorola PowerPC
architecture is announced and will probably be in production in a few
months. All these alternative architectures can beat Pentium
price/performance at various price levels, as long as the same operating
system is ported to each, like SPEC benchmarks. The PowerPC 601 is cheaper
to make than the BiCMOS Pentium, and it beats it roundly, as does the
R4400. The R4200 equals the Pentium on integer performance and can be made
far cheaper than any of the others. The Alpha exists only in a high-end
version so far, but its architecture also proves what RISC advocates have
claimed for years. Whether Windows NT is successful or not, there is
little doubt that future operating systems from any source will be like it
in one respect. They will be based on microkernels with a hardware
abstraction layer that together contain all architecture-specific code.
Everything else will be designed to be recompiled. Other current
operating system contenders for the PC are Solaris and Next. Both were
ported to Intel architecture after they were running on others–Sparc and
68000, respectively. Furthermore, strong Unix industry efforts to achieve a
common applications-program interface and user interface are active right
now. OS/2 version 2.1 is Intel-specific, but IBM says it will build the
next version on the Carnegie-Mellon Mach microkernel, making it portable
to other architectures. Down the road is Taligent/Pink, from Apple/IBM,
about which all is speculation. For any alternative processor to make
inroads into the PC market, three things must come together: * An
important application must be native and run faster at the same price than
it would on an Intel machine. * Existing DOS and DOS/Windows applications
well enough under emulation to be tolerable for occasional use. * The
processor must be cheap. For the R4x00 family, AutoCAD already fulfills
the first requirement. It is a major application for which machines are
bought, and it runs better on Iris Indigo than it does on PCs. The third
requirement appears to be coming with ASICs that let Mips processors run
in otherwise 486-type motherboards. Windows NT could be the sticking
point. How well it will accommodate DOS and DOS/Windows programs even on
486 machines remains to be seen. Its emulation facility is really unknown.
Without good emulation, PC industry consultant Nick Tredennick will be
proved right once more. “The RISCs win all the benchmarks and get all the
press, while Intel collects all the revenue,” he observed. –Rodney
Myrvaagnes
CAPTION FOR DIE SHOT:
Advanced Micro Devices' Am486 chip, like its predecessor 386, was
reengineered following the logic of the Intel chip. The 486, however, is
offered with clean-room microcode, as well as the contested Intel
microcode, in otherwise identical chips.
CAPTION FOR DIE SHOT.
Advanced Micro Devices' Am486 chip, like its predecessor 386, was
re-engineered following the logic of the Intel chip. The 486, however, is
offered with clean-room microcode, as well as the contested Intel
microcode, in otherwise identical chips.
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