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At the Microsoft/Intel Workstation Leadership Forum '98, held on March 6 in Seattle, Craig R. Barrett, Intel's president and COO, expounded on his company's elaborate plans to dominate the engineering workstation market with microprocessors powering systems that run under Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. Sketching out what he described as the Intel's roadmap for workstations, he took his audience on a guided tour of the 32- and 64-bit processors--some intended largely for engineering applications--the Santa Clara, Calif.­based company plans to launch this year and next.

Barrett began by comparing the forthcoming products to the "disruptive technologies" analyzed several years ago in a Harvard Business Review article by Clayton M. Christensen and Joseph L. Bower ("Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave," January­February 1995). Performance requirements, the authors noted, tend to increase in almost all industries. From time to time, quite suddenly, a new technology enters the scene and intersects a particular requirements curve. They cited the example of the steel industry, in which "mini-mills" using scrap steel achieved better price/performance ratios than traditional mills could offer and thus took over a considerable share of the manufacture of steel plate in the United States and the rest of the world.

In the workstation business, Barrett noted, the requirements increase relentlessly every year. Traditional vendors of RISC- and Unix-based workstations do provide increased performance in their high-priced systems, he conceded. Meanwhile, however, the performance of cheap computers based on Intel architecture (IA) processors has been steadily, even dramatically, "moving up in the PC space." In 1995, Intel finally "intersected the workstation requirement curve" with the Pentium Pro processor, Barrett declared. At that moment, there was a "sea change--a point when a disruptive technology comes in with better price/performance than the existing technology" can offer, as well as a steeper growth curve.

The impact in the workstation market came almost immediately. By 1996, according to International Data Corp., Framingham, Mass., sales of what Barrett called "IA/NT workstations"--Intel architecture systems running under Windows NT--exceeded those of RISC-based workstations. Many companies that formerly designed their products on RISC- and Unix-based workstations, including Intel itself (see "One Company, One Architecture"), are now making the switch.

Figure 1	Memory subsystem advances
Increasingly larger, faster, and cheaper memories have helped the price/performance ratio of workstations based on Intel architecture microprocessors and Windows NT to soar.

Forecasts typically suggest that over the next few years RISC- and Unix-based workstations will become much less common and IA/NT workstations much more so. By the year 2000 or 2001, Barrett speculated, commodity IA/NT workstations will outnumber their RISC/Unix counterparts 10 to 1.

"What really counts," he repeatedly stressed, is the price/performance ratios the IA/NT juggernaut delivers to the market. Intel didn't achieve these ratios on its own, he admitted: They derive not only from fast, scalable processors, but also from large amounts of cheap memory (see Figure 1), big local caches, a fast back-side bus, good cache bandwidth, and excellent graphics--not to mention the operating system, Windows NT. With the forthcoming Version 5, Microsoft, too, will be attempting to storm the bastions of higher-priced hardware.

Why didn't Intel and Microsoft attempt to dominate the engineering workstation business earlier? According to Barrett, until quite recently his company wasn't really competing in this market. In 1994 and 1995, he said, "we had only a skeleton crew focusing specifically on the workstation part of our business--only a couple of dozen people," not, of course, including those who designed microprocessors and other applicable technologies or manufacturing specialists. At that point, the company was spending just "a few million dollars a year on workstation applications in particular."

Figure 2	Intel's processor roadmap
Since Intel started to penetrate the engineering workstation market with the Pentium Pro in 1995, its 32-bit processors have grown steadily more powerful. The 64-bit Merced is slated for introduction in the second half of 1999.

As of 1998, Barrett revealed, the number of Intel employees developing applications and chip sets specifically for workstation platforms (again excluding the same categories of people) has increased thirtyfold, to about 750. The company has spent "millions of dollars"--he didn't say how many--"to take our core capability and put it into workstations" for the engineering market.

"What does that kind of investment get you?" he asked. For Intel, the answer is several increasingly powerful generations of microprocessors the company intends to promote in workstation applications. The 200-MHz Pentium Pro of 1995 was a single package with a processor and a back-side cache. Next came the Pentium II, which made its debut in 1997. The company's most recent Pentium II is a 333-MHz microprocessor in the so-called slot-one configuration, with a half-side, half-speed back-side bus, local cache memory, and a front-side single-edge connector system.

A new form factor

In the middle of the present year, Barrett announced, Intel plans to introduce a new form factor specifically for engineering workstations: the Pentium II with SVW ("server workstations" technology). The SVW family of chips, coming initially in 400- and 450-MHz versions, will have a full-speed back-side bus and a faster front-side bus than do standard Pentium II chips. Though they won't fit into existing slots, they will offer much higher performance. Thanks to the faster front-side bus, a full-speed back-side bus, and a bigger cache memory, Barrett said, a Pentium II 400-MHz processor in the SVW configuration will provide a "phenomenal" increase in cache bandwidth and system bus bandwidth.

Barrett's starting point for these comparisons was the new 333-MHz (non-SVW) Pentium II mentioned earlier. In the same configuration as RISC-based systems, he claimed, "it gives you absolutely comparable performance at about half the price."

"As soon as we introduce the SVW version at 400 and 450 MHz," he exulted, "you're going to see a 25 to 30 percent improvement in performance." It won't be accompanied by a substantial rise in price, he said.

Scalability is another significant part of the picture, since most of the workstation hardware that Intel OEMs ship out these days comes in multiprocessor configurations. According to Barrett, moving up from a system based on a single 300-MHz Pentium II to a dual-processor system gives users "about double the performance."

Furthermore, the forthcoming Pentium II SVW configuration "makes scalability easy"--not only from one to two processors, but also from two to four. There will be "very dramatic improvements" in the way multithreaded applications perform, he claimed.

Impressive graphics

Workstation applications also require impressive graphics, and here, too, Intel has some tricks up its sleeve. The company has already started moving from the old PCI bus, at 133 Mbits/s, to the Accelerated Graphics Board (AGP) interface, which offers speeds of up to a gigabit per second. What's more, it's already working on the follow-on to the AGP; in fact, Barrett took the opportunity of his presentation to announce the coming of the AGP Pro, a new physical configuration and standard associated with the AGP 2.0 specification, which calls for a bigger connector, more power, and higher thermal efficiency.

For Intel, the next challenge will be to promote the development of workstation application programs that run best on IA/NT systems. Here, too, the company is moving fast. One initiative involves setting up "application solution centers" to ease the task of porting and optimizing Unix applications onto IA/NT workstations. Intel has opened 7 and expects, with the help of its major computer OEMs, to open an additional 10 this year.

A second program involves what Barrett referred to as "a more proactive effort" to develop native IA/NT applications with those OEMs and Microsoft. Intel is providing tools, training, and hardware that will help companies write and optimize workstation applications on the "latest, greatest, and hottest IA microprocessors."

Meanwhile, the company is continuing to invest heavily across the board--to the tune of about $3 billion this year, Barrett said--for research and development into microprocessors, process technologies, and peripheral chip sets. "We have a strong 32-bit roadmap, including several generations of 32-bit processors under design," he continued (see Figure 2), and will continue to promote these 32-bit processors for computers that cost less than a thousand dollars and for the low-end server workstation business. And beyond such systems, the company is now developing its next generation of microprocessors, the Merced (see "The Next Wave"), with Hewlett-Packard Co. (Palo Alto, Calif.)

Roger Draper is a writer and editor who lives in New York City.

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integrated system design  May 1998