SAN JOSE -- Intel Corp. plans to break the 1-GHz barrier in the mobile space in the first half of 2001, the company said Tuesday, while rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. disclosed its first multiprocessor implementation.
While the presentations at the Microprocessor Forum here have been geared towards a technical audience of engineers and system designers, stock-conscious manufacturers have also disclosed product milestones to attract additional investment.
"The mobile market isn't what it used to be in the following sense," said Bob Jackson, principal engineer at Intel's Mobile Products Group in Santa Clara, Calif. "It's grown enormously, and in the other sense it's segmented as it hasn't done before."
About 60% of the notebooks shipped this year will be in the "thin and light" category, which combines high performance and low power, according to Intel.
Santa Clara-based Intel plans to break the 1-GHz barrier with its mobile microprocessor about a year after it first sampled its desktop processors at 1 GHz, according to company presentation materials provided to Forum attendees.
"The device will not be a "brand-new processor," Jackson said. Executives said the 1-GHz chip will be a standard Pentium III. The device should be available in the first half of 2001, aswell as a second device optimized for the lowest-power segments of the industry.
Two new processors will be introduced in 2002, one for the high end of the market and the other addressing the thin-and-light, mini-notebook, and sub-notebook sector.
Jackson said Intel is trying to provide the best performance in each of the notebook segments, through a single platform design extended across all of those segments to maximize stability.
Chip rival AMD of Sunnyvale, Calif., also demonstrated two of its Athlon microprocessors working together in its first multiprocessor implementation.
The demonstration consisted of a computer powered by dual AMD Athlon processors, the AMD-760MP chip set, and next-generation double data rate (DDR) memory.
"Today's demonstration brings AMD one step closer to enable our customers to offer next-generation dual processor workstations and servers powered by AMD processors," said Rich Heye, vice president and general manager of AMD's Texas Microprocessor Division, in a statement.
"AMD's dual processor platform is designed to take the extremely successful AMD Athlon processor into the enterprise markets that require multiprocessing workstation and server solutions."
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