1GHz Or Bust: Intel, AMD Look To 1 Billion Clock Cycles By Mid-Year.

At Intel Corp.'s spring Developer Forum in Palm Springs, company officials demonstrated a PIII running at 1.5GHz, and indicated that 1GHz chips will ship in volume by year end. The faster chip, code-named Willamette, is in sample silicon right now and should be in limited availability by year end. The chips will target high-performance desktop PCs, not servers, according to the company.

Intel was very briefly trumped on the speed scale by AMD Corp., which showed a 1.1GHz version of Athlon in early February. Not to be outdone, Intel company officials outlined an accelerated fabrication plan to get the chips to OEMs quickly, presumably before AMD can get its chips out the door.

Intel senior VP Albert Yu, GM of Intel's Microprocessor Products Group, described the chip's new microarchitecture, which incorporates two new chip technologies and an add-on on SIMD. According to Yu, the chip's new, "hyper pipelined design" enables instructions to be queued and executed at a much faster rate, allowing processors to achieve higher clock speeds. An additional set of 144 new SIMD instructions (called SIMD2) will accelerate video, and the chip will take advantage of Intel's new 400MHz system bus. The chip will use dual-channel RDRAM from Rambus.

Intel also announced a new integrated CPU for low-cost (sub-$600) PCs, code-named Timna. Timna is based on the current P6 microarchitecture and includes a CPU core, a memory controller, and an integrated graphics engine which will allow OEMs to eliminate the expense of a separate graphics card. Timna is expected in H2 2000, and will complement Intel's current Celeron line. Expect systems from the usual suspects over the next three months. No pricing for any of the new chips had been announced at press time.