David T. Lin, chairman and chief executive officer of Rise (Santa Clara, Calif.), introduced his company's MP6 superscalar processor and outlined plans to tackle the relatively young "base PC" market for sub-$1,000 PCs and notebooks.

That market didn't exist when Rise started work on its processor in 1993. But the company's original plans — to create a superscalar architecture tailored to multimedia applications and low power consumption — haven't changed. Fortunately for Rise, such features are coming in vogue for cheaper PCs, according to Joe Salvador, the company's senior product manager.

"The drive for us is to be able to provide these features to the basic PC desktop and notebook segments," he said.

Rise executives are being coy about details such as price and clock speed, and they aren't willing to quantify the chip's "low power" claims. Most of that information is due to be released as the MP6 reaches general sampling later this quarter. In the meantime, Rise is promoting itself by revealing architectural details of its chip.

Intended to last for six generations of product, the MP6 architecture relies on parallelism for its performance. The architecture handles three instructions per clock cycle, a figure matched in X86 circles only by Intel's Pentium II. Likewise, the chip improves multimedia performance by handling three MMX instructions per clock cycle, while Intel handles only two instructions per cycle and other competitors are relegated to just one.

The extra performance primes MP6 to handle DVD or modem functions — two areas critical for high-performing base PCs, Salvador said — in software without eating up CPU cycles. The MP6 also benefits from a pipelined floating-point unit, meaning it runs multiple FPU calculations simultaneously. Rise is touting this feature as a way to get faster 3-D graphics performance.

Through this architecture, Rise hopes to pack more functionality into the low-end PC market. "Now we can do the functions that previously were only done by a performance PC," Lin said.

On the low-power front, MP6 is instituting a conservation strategy. "When something's not being used — for example, if the floating-point unit's not being used — we shut off the power to it," Salvador said.

MP6 complies with the Super Socket 7 specification, which was designed to carry Intel's Socket 7 package up to 100-MHz bus speeds through the use of particular chip sets. Not surprisingly, an anonymous chip set vendor is among Rise's recent investors. "Certainly, they see us as a viable alternative that lets them play in this market," Salvador said.

Rise also hopes to produce parts in ball-grid-array packaging and to target its parts particularly at the notebook market.

Timing might be in Rise's favor, with alternative X86s gaining credence through the efforts of Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Integrated Device Technology Inc. and the Cyrix division of National Semiconductor Corp. According to Lin, Rise is in discussions with "not-so-small" OEMs that are targeting the sub-$1,000 market.

"They're beginning to knock on our door," said Lin, who declined to name any OEMs. He said that many potential customers want to remain in step with Intel's product announcements, and that Rise is "very sensitive to that, so we will not disclose the names," he said.

Similarly, the relatively recent advent of high-performance notebooks plays well into Rise's hands, as the company designed low power into its architecture from day one, Salvador said. In addition, low-cost desktops have been shrinking in size and are beginning to demand lower power as well, he said.

Rise has secured foundry agreements to cover demand in a range that Lin said is a requirement of breaking into the business. "If you cannot guarantee, say, one-million units per year, [OEMs] will not have interest," he said. Rise's foundry agreements cover such demand, he said.

Rise hopes to stretch MP6 into a family of products serving a range of PC price levels.

By the end of this year, the company hopes to present the MP6 II, which will feature 256 kbytes of Level 2 cache, or twice the amount on Intel's second-generation Celeron chips, Salvador said.

Rise plans to have the MP6 in full production later this quarter. Samples of MP6 II are due by year's end, with volume shipments scheduled for the first quarter of 1999.