🚀 go-pugleaf

  Every so often someone from Intel
slips and offers a peek into chips out on the horizon. Craig
Barrett, vice president of Intel, said at a Dataquest Semiconductor
conference in Monterey, California this week that the P6, the Intel
microprocessor out on the horizon beyond the "soon to come" P5
chipset, will be completed within the next 18 months.
  Intel's next microprocessor chip, the P5, has been put off for
release until first quarter of 1993 and is reported to feature more
than three million transistors. Barrett revealed that the P6 will
have some 10 million transistors.
  Intel likes to keep information about its planned microprocessors
under wraps during development for obvious reasons. However, the
company has said the P5 will be able to perform 4 to 10 times faster
in floating point calculations (also known as math coprocessor
functions) than the 33 megahertz 486 DX chip and has a super scaler
design.
  But Intel Corp is determined to make itself as fast a moving
target as possible, and with the P5 still unannounced, has
reiterated its intention to start shipping the follow-on P6 as soon
as the fourth quarter of next year, a threat first made in February.
  Executive vice-president Craig Barrett told Dataquest's
Semiconductor Industry Conference in Monterey that the P6 will
integrate some 10m transistors, against 1.2 for the 80486 and 3.1
for the P5. The company is still pitching for 100m transistors and 2
GIPS by the year 2000, and says that that kind of performance will
be needed for applicatiosn such as handwriting recognition.
  The P7, the first 64-bit member of the iAPX-86 family, is
scheduled for 1994 or 1995, and will be aimed initially at the
supercomputer market - taking on the role that had been marked out
for the ill-fated 80860, before finding its way into servers and
workstations. Our sister paper Unigram.X also hears of a P54, which
could be a P5 in 80486 clothing, and the P67, which may be a 1994
transition chip between the P6 and P7. Apparently the P67 will have
64-bit characteristics like a 64-bit EISA extension but most of it
will be 32-bit.

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        Ron Gaudreau              | rgaudre@triton.unm.edu  
    University of New Mexico      |