| December 11, 1998 |
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By Mike Magee
December 10, 1998
The Register
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Clone manufacturer Cyrix claimed today
that Intel was engaged in a cynical exercise to dump Slot
One Celerons in the run-up to the introduction of its 370
pin platform next month. Alain Tiquet, European
strategic sales manager at NatSemi-Cyrix, said: "The
[Slot One] Celeron has not been successful and Intel is
having to dump parts. It doesn't have any strategy at the
lower end. Intel has to find a way to dump this product
before it's really too late."
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By Mike Magee
December 11, 1998
The Register
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Intel cut the cost of Slot One
Celeron’s last Sunday to $97 for the 333MHz part
with 128K cache and $80 for the 300A in a bid to move the
market fast to the 370-pin part it will announce in
January. Before last weekend, these parts cost $159
and $138 respectively, when bought in large quantities.
But the chip giant is still denying that it is dumping
Celerons onto the market, despite yesterday’s claims
from a senior Cyrix Europe executive.
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By Jim Davis and Stephanie Miles
December 10, 1998
C/Net
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Intel continues to be conspicuously
absent from some of the latest low-cost computers hitting
the market in the holiday season. As Compaq Computer
prepares new low-cost consumer PCs and NEC rolls out a
sub-$1,000 notebook, new research from International Data
Corporation shows that Intel continues to be challenged
at the low end of the PC market.
Compaq is getting ready to introduce five new consumer
PCs in January, with three of the computers expected to
be priced between $699 and $999, according to sources. Of
all the new systems being readied, only the priciest--a
system estimated by industry sources to cost $2,100--will
offer an Intel chip.
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By Mike Magee
December 10, 1998
The Register
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Roy Taylor and John Byrne, joint
managing directors of VML UK, have signed up x.86 clone
manufacturer Rise as their client. The x.86 cloner,
emanating from Taiwan, makes cheap chips which work
perfectly with Windows 95 and other operating systems
belonging to Microsoft.
Taylor refused to comment on details of the deal, but
confirmed that he would be the representative of the Rise
x.86 clones in January 1999.
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By Mike Magee
December 10, 1998
The Register
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The first real sign of action in an
anti-trust suit against Intel took place in the US
yesterday when Intergraph lawyers crossed swords with
their counterparts at the chip giant. According to US
reports, Intel lawyers asked a circuit court judge in
Washington to overturn a decision by a district court
judge Edwin Nelson that it supply Intergraph with
technical information.
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See Related
Articles Intel,
Intergraph argue over injunction
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By Bloomberg News and Reuters
December 10, 1998
C/Net
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National Semiconductor, a rival of top
computer-chip maker Intel, reported a
smaller-than-expected fiscal second-quarter loss, helped
by sales of its microprocessors for low-cost PCs. National
said the loss amounted to 57 cents per share and came on
sales of $510 million. A year earlier, the company earned
$28.9 million, or 17 cents per share, on sales of $720
million. The period, the second quarter of the company's
fiscal year, ended November 29.
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| Today's Related News |
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By Larry Dignan
December 11, 1998
ZD Net News
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National Semiconductor Corp.'s
second-quarter results were bad, but not that bad. The
company on Thursday reported a quarterly operating loss
of $48.6 million, or 29 cents a share, on revenue of
$510.1 million. So what's so good about that? Wall
Street was expecting a loss of 49 cents a share.
Including charges related to a manufacturing
restructuring the end of a foundry agreement with IBM,
National Semi (NSM) lost $94.4 million, or 57 cents a
share, for the quarter.
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By Sergio G. Non
December 10, 1998
TechWeb
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National Semiconductor continued to lose
money in the second quarter. According to results
released Thursday afternoon, the Santa Clara,
Calif.-based chip maker lost $48.6 million, or 29 cents a
share, excluding one-time expenses. Second quarter sales
were $510 million, down from $720 million a year earlier.
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December 10, 1998
Semiconductor Business News
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National Semiconductor Corp. here today
reported a net loss of $94.4 million, including one-time
charges, on sales of $510.1 million in the fiscal
quarter, ended Nov. 29. Without the charges related to
the termination of a foundry agreement with IBM Corp. and
restructuring of operations, National's net loss would
have been $48.6 million. The loss was seen as an
improvement over the previous quarter when National
reported a net loss of $104.8 million on revenues of
$469.9 million. The termination of National's Cyrix
microprocessor foundry agreement with IBM has help the
company increase the use of its wafer fab in South
Portland, Maine.
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By News Staff
December 10, 1998
Electronic Buyers' News
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Despite suffering an operating loss for
the second time this fiscal year, National Semiconductor
Corp. remains upbeat about its performance. National
today reported a net loss of $48.6 million, or 29 cents
per share, on revenues of $510.1 million. Including
one-time charges associated with the termination of a
foundry agreement with IBM Corp., National's total loss
for its second fiscal quarter was $94.4 million, or 57
cents per share.
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By Rebecca Sykes
December 10, 1998
InfoWorld Electric
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National Semiconductor on Thursday
reported a net loss of $48.6 million, or $0.29 cents per
share, on revenues of $51 million for the second quarter
that ended Nov. 29. The results do not include the
effect of one-time charges related to manufacturing
restructuring and termination of a foundry agreement with
IBM, according to a statement from National
Semiconductor.
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By Mike Magee
December 11, 1998
The Register
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National Semiconductor made a net loss
of $48.6 million on revenues of $510.1 million for Q2 of
its 1999 financial year but said that it was encouraged
by some buoyancy in the market. In the equivalent
period last year, it made a net profit of $28.9 million
on turnover of $719.9 million.
In the period, it had to pay IBM nearly $50 million to
terminate its Cyrix foundry agreement, as exclusively
revealed here which had a big effect on the results.
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| December 10, 1998 |
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By David Lammers
December 10, 1998
EE Times
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Intel Corp. came to the 44th
International Electron Devices Meeting with a description
of the 0.18-micron process it will take into volume
production next year with its Katmai processor. The delay
per stage was reported to be less than 11 picoseconds at
1.5 V, which Intel claims is the best reported in the
literature to date for a 0.18-micron process. The process
was designed for operating voltages of 1.3 to 1.5 volts.
And instead of using copper, the company is sticking wiht
aluminum wiring, for now. Eschewing copper, Intel chose
to stick with aluminum wiring, but adopted a fluorided
silicon oxide (SiO2F) material for the
inter-level-dielectric. By adding 5.5 percent fluoride to
silicon dioxide, the ILD has a k value of 3.55, compared
with 4.1 for Intel's previous SiO2-based ILD.
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By James Niccolai
December 10, 1998
InfoWorld Electric
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Intel and Intergraph each presented oral
arguments before a U.S. federal appeals court Wednesday
in Intergraph's patent infringement lawsuit against the
chip maker, spokesmen from both companies said. In a
brief hearing before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Federal Circuit in Washington, lawyers for each side tied
together arguments made in briefs and motions submitted
to the court since Intergraph was awarded an injunction
against Intel by a lower court in April, said Intel
spokesman Chuck Mulloy.
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By Andy Patrizio
December 9, 1998
TechWeb
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Intel is taking its multiple CPU
strategy to the laptop market, introducing three
individual chips in an attempt to stratify the market,
just as it did for desktop and server machines. Instead
of offering chips for the high end and low end, like it
did with the Xeon and Celeron, Intel is aiming its laptop
chips down. The Pentium II chip will remain the top end
of the mobile-computing product line, and Intel will
boost performance to 366 MHz in the first quarter of
1999. Now, top of the line laptops run only as high as
300 MHz.
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By Margaret Quan
December 9, 1998
EE Times
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In a display of good corporate
citizenship that may also reflect a desire to crack the
defense market, Intel Corp. has granted a royalty-free
Pentium license to the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia
National Laboratories for development of a
radiation-hardened version of the processor for use in
satellites, space vehicles and defense systems. At a
press conference at Intel's Santa Clara headquarters,
Intel president and chief executive officer Craig Barrett
quipped that it is part of Intel's plan for
"intergalactic expansion." Barrett said Intel
had three primary motives for granting Sandia a free
license to the Pentium: a patriotic allegiance to U.S.
interests, a long working relationship with the DOE on
similar projects and a desire to move technology forward
in the low-volume markets for space, satellite and
defense systems.
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| December 9, 1998 |
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By Brooke Crothers
December 9, 1998
C/Net
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One of the world's largest makers of
Intel-compatible chips may be close to cutting a deal
with the chip giant, indicating that the Pentium II
chipset market may finally be open for competition. But
the price of admission is high. SiS, which makes
Intel-compatible chipsets, is close to signing an
agreement with Intel regarding the rights to make Pentium
II chipsets, according to sources at the Taiwanese
company. The chipset, together with the main Pentium II
processor, forms the core of a personal computer.
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By John Spooner
December 8, 1998
PC Week Online
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Thanks to a licensing agreement inked by
Intel Corp. today, smart bombs and space shuttles may
soon have "Intel inside." The Santa Clara,
Calif., company announced it has licensed its Pentium
processor design to the U.S. government for use in space
travel and national defense.
Under the royalty-free agreement, the Department of
Energy's Sandia National Laboratories, which handles
microelectronics research and development, will create
Pentium-based processors that are "hardened" to
resist the effects of radiation, such as cosmic rays.
Radiation can negatively affect the reliability of
conventional microprocessors, Intel officials said.
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See
Today's Related Stories |
The Socket
Wars
How Intel is giving R&D a bad name
By Hal Plotkin
December 9, 1998
SF Gate
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Years ago, most "research and
development" spending went into the lab, giving us
everything from light bulbs to integrated circuits to
pacemakers. By focusing on the "Really Big
Questions," R&D often led to incredible, not
just incremental, leaps. Wall Street analysts began
evaluating companies by measuring the proportion of
corporate revenues devoted to R&D. And politicians
enacted corporate tax credits to subsidize R&D.
Lionized by the press, R&D became technology's most
sacred cow.
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By Mike Magee
December 7, 1998
The Register
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Sources close to Intel said today that
the company has already started shipping volumes of its
370-pin Celerons at speeds of 333Mhz and 300MHz. And
Intel has also started shipping 366MHz 370-pin ships in
engineering quantities, the same source said.
That follows reports from a number of motherboard
manufacturers and distributors that they are having
difficulty sourcing silicon.
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| Today's
Related Stories |
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December 9, 1998
By Aaron Baca
Albuquerque Journal
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The firm
will turn over the blueprint to Sandia labs, which will
develop radiation-hardened chips
Intel Corp., which makes billions of dollars a year
from its Pentium microprocessors, is giving away the
design for the prized money-making computer chip.
The company announced Tuesday at its California
headquarters that it will donate the design for the
original Pentium processor to Sandia National
Laboratories for a $64 million, four-year project to
develop new chips for the nation's space and defense
industries.
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By Mark Hachman
December 8, 1998
Electronic Buyer's News
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Intel Corp. Tuesday licensed its
“classic” Pentium microprocessor, free of
charge, to Sandia National Laboratories, which will
develop versions of the Pentium for use in outer space
together with other U.S. government and military
agencies. The new “radiation-hardened”
Pentiums, plus an undisclosed number of supporting core
logic chipsets, will be designed by Sandia at its
facility in Livermore, Calif. Development costs will be
jointly underwritten by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory;
the National Reconnaissance Office, which designs the
nation's spy satellites; and the Air Force Research
Laboratory.
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By Stephen Shankland
December 8, 1998
C/Net
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Intel has licensed its Pentium chip
technology to the federal government for free to make a
radiation-proof Pentium chip that will bring greater
processing power to spy satellites and other spacecraft. Intel
will provide the Energy Department's Sandia National
Laboratories with a royalty-free license to the Pentium
chip design, and Sandia personnel will make a new version
of the chip that can survive the harsh radiation that
afflicts electronic equipment in satellites and other
spacecraft.
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By Reuters
December 8, 1998
Tech Web
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Computer-chip giant Intel said it will
license its Pentium-processor design to the U.S.
Department of Energy in a royalty-free deal for the
development of custom-made, radiation-proof processors
for space and defense purposes. The agreement will
save U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in
microprocessor-design costs and provide the government
with a nearly tenfold increase in processing power over
the highest-performing technology in use today, Intel
said. Intel is the largest maker of computer chips, and
its microprocessors are the "brains" of most of
the world's PCs.
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| December 8, 1998 |
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By Peter Brown
December 7, 1998
Electronic Times
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IBM and Silicon Graphics last week said
they would design double data rate (DDR) dynamic RAM
chips into their servers and workstations, giving the
technology a big boost in its battle with Rambus DRAM.
Hewlett-Packard is also expected to soon announce
adoption of DDR in high-end systems. The developments
indicate that although Intel might be able to anoint
direct Rambus (D-RDRAM) as the memory technology of
choice for personal computers, it has less control over
OEMs of higher-end systems. Manufacturers of DRAMs,
meanwhile, are hoping to establish DDR as an alternative
memory technology because Rambus requires them to make an
extra investment in infrastructure and pay royalties to
Rambus. If DDR secures a beachhead in servers and
workstations, it could advance into the PC arena as well,
some believe.
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By Jim DeTar
December 7, 1998
Electronic Times
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The licensing agreement struck between
VIA Technologies and Intel Corp last week represents more
than a technology exchange; it provides insight into
Intel's long-term strategy to guide the market in the
direction of its proprietary architectures, industry
watchers said. Under terms of the agreement, Intel
granted VIA a so-called Slot 1 license to manufacture and
sell certain members of VIA's Apollo Pro family of
chipsets designed to operate with Intel's bus
micro-architecture used in its Pentium II
microprocessors.
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| December 7, 1998 |
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By Dominique Deckmyn
December 7, 1998
VNU News Service
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A controversial ruling by a Californian
judge on behalf of Intel is causing an outcry among civil
rights activists. A preliminary injunction issued by
the Sacramento County Superior Court is prohibiting Ken
Hamidi, a former Intel-employee, from flooding
ex-colleagues with e-mail that criticises the company.
According to US reports, Ken Hamidi and the Face Intel
organisation he founded, accuse the chip maker of
discrimination on the basis of age and race - complaints
he made in a series of e-mail messages that were sent to
about 30,000 Intel employees.
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See
Today's Related Stories See Related Stories
Intel
gets restraining order against email spammer
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By Mark Hachman and Sandy Chen
December 4, 1998
Electronic Buyers' News
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Intel Corp. has backed up its pledge to
simplify its chipset schedule while speeding new product
introductions through manufacturing improvements,
according to customers. Intel's “transition
management” program is designed to reduce the
testing and other qualifications necessary to convert to
a new product, especially a chipset. That strategy, as
well as a hurried pace of processor introductions, was
spelled out in confidential Intel product roadmaps
obtained by EBN.
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By Mike Magee
December 7, 1998
The Register
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Intel will release its 450MHz and 500MHz
Slot One Katmai chips at the end of February next year
and is pricing them at $528 and $760 respectively. But
those prices are set to drop to $445 and $675
respectively on the 11 April 1999.
The processors, which use a 100MHz bus and come with
512K of L2 cache, include additional MMX instruction sets
designed to appeal to workstation and high end desktops.
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By Mike Magee
December 7, 1998
The Register
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Cyrix has slashed prices on its two
high-end MII processors today as a battle-royal begins
between it, AMD and Intel. Prices on its MII-333MHz
part drops to $80/1000 from $90/1000, and on its
MII-300MHz processor to $59/1000 from $67/1000.
Its other two processors, the MII-233 and the MII-266
remain stable at $48 and $55 respectively.
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By Linley Gwennap
December 7, 1998
Microprocessor Report
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Intel's decision to release its
Mendocino processor without a module in 1Q99 is just the
tip of the iceberg. By the end of next year, we expect
Intel to be shipping moduleless processors into all of
its market segments, and by the end of 2000, virtually
all of its chips will plug into sockets instead of slots.
This trend will be enabled by a shift to on-die level-two
(L2) cache, which makes today's module structure
superfluous. The initial purpose of the Slot 1 module
was to hold the external L2 cache chips required by the
Klamath and Deschutes CPUs. Mendocino (see MPR 8/24/98,
p. 1) doesn't need external cache chips, as it is Intel's
first processor to incorporate the entire cache
subsystem. To maintain compatibility with these earlier
processors, Mendocino is currently shipping in a Slot 1
module, despite the fact that, other than the CPU, the
module contains no active components and is
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By Michael Slater
December 7, 1998
Microprocessor Report
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For nearly 20 years, derivatives of the
instruction-set architecture Intel created for the 8086
have dominated the world of general-purpose computing.
Thanks to the spectacular success of the IBM PC and the
standard it spawned, the x86 architecture has achieved a
level of success that no one would have dared hope for. For
years, the architecture evolved slowly, and often
ineptly. The 80186 was incompatible with existing PC
software, because Intel didn't fully anticipate the
rigors of DOS compatibility. The 286 inflicted on the
industry a memory-management scheme that wasted thousands
of man-years of programmer effort and held back OS and
application technology for years. With the 386 and its
paged memory management and 32-bit extensions, the x86
architecture finally achieved a level good enough for its
remaining weaknesses--plentiful as they are--to be
relatively insignificant.
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By Mike Magee
December 7, 1998
The Register
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Rumours that IBM and AMD are in
negotiations over a merger have re-surfaced again
following frantic share movements on Wall Street. For
some weeks, investors have questioned whether IBM should
split its shares which closed on Wall Street last Friday
at $164 1/4, up three quarters on the day.
Meanwhile, AMD's share price rose by nearly two
dollars on Friday on rumours of the acquisition and stood
at $31 3/8. Over four million AMD shares were traded that
day.
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By Carmen Nobel
December 4, 1998
PC Week Online
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Several weeks after introducing an
initiative to build a fast, switched-fabric I/O
architecture, Intel Corp. (INTC) not only has failed to
get support from several large server makers, but some
independent hardware vendors are balking, too.A
handful of networking and component makers say they're
not ready to fall in step with Intel's NGIO (Next
Generation I/O) project because they aren't sure what
intellectual property rights they will have to give up
and they want to see if a competing architecture emerges.
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By Andrew MacLellan
December 4, 1998
Electronic Buyers' News
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Despite Intel Corp.'s well-orchestrated
campaign to guide OEMs toward a single next-generation
memory architecture, a group of component suppliers this
week made it clear that Direct Rambus DRAM won't be the
only debutante at next year's coming-out party. Forging
a path parallel to the one blazed by Intel and its
architectural partner, Rambus Inc., nearly a dozen DRAM
vendors said they will ramp double-data-rate SDRAM into
volume production in 1999, giving OEMs a competitive
high-bandwidth memory alternative
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By John Lettice
December 7, 1998
The Register
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Intel is to announce the first nuclear
holocaust proof chip tomorrow, according to US reports.
The breakthrough, reported in today's issue of Defence
Week, could ensure the Great Satan's final triumph over
its rivals - albeit at some considerable cost in
collateral damage to chip customers. The new chip has
reportedly been developed in conjunction with the US
government's Sandia National Labs in New Mexico, and will
provide the basis for radiation-hardened computers.
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| Today's
Related Stories |
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By Jim Hu
December 4, 1998
C/Net
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In what could prove to be an influential
ruling, Intel has won a court order to halt mass email
messages email messages to its employees criticizing the
firm. The issue at hand is whether one man's tactic to
express his public outrage toward his former employer
constitutes an expression of free speech or
"spam."
Last week, Judge John R. Lewis of the Sacramento
County Superior Court issued a preliminary injunction
against Ken Hamidi, an embittered former Intel employee,
mandating that he stop sending email messages to active
Intel employees.
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See Related
Stories Intel
gets restraining order against email spammer
US
court measure against Intel critic causes freedom of
speech outcry
|
