FIRM PROJECTS PCS' FUTURE\Models in five years to be many times faster with more memory.

Byline: Dan Stets Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Now that you've just plunked down $2,500 or so for a new computer with a Pentium 100-megahertz processor, let me tell you what you could buy if you just waited five years.

The "typical PC" of 2000 will have an Intel P7 processor running at 400 MHz. Because of changes in the processor design, it will be 10 times faster than this year's Pentium 100.

This "typical" machine will have 64 megabytes of dynamic random access memory or DRAM, 10 gigabytes of fixed storage, and a writable CD drive.

That machine you just bought probably has 8 to 16 megabytes of DRAM, 1 to 1.6 gigabytes of storage, and a CD-ROM. That ROM means you can only read the data on the disc, not put new data on it.

Does it sound futuristic or just far out?

Maybe a little of both, but according to a new study from Dataquest, a California-based market research firm, it is a sober projection of where PC technology will be in five years.

Dataquest doesn't seem to think prospects are bright for the $500 Internet machine, a notion being kicked around by IBM, Oracle Corp. and others.

Consumers and businesses will continue to demand full-featured PCs, in Dataquest's view. The firm estimates that the total PC market will be well over 100 million units by the year 2000, compared to this year's projection of about 60 million units.

At least two-thirds of those computers will be powered by Intel's Pentium Pro, which has just come on the market, or by what is now called the P7, the next generation of Intel chips.

Intel has not yet given the P7 a name. The company seems to like the Pentium brand name, using it first for the P5 and now the P6. Maybe the P7 will be the Pentium Pro Plus.

Not too much is known about the chip as of yet other than that it is supposed to be similar, at least in some superficial ways, to the PowerPC chip jointly developed by IBM, Apple and Motorola.

The same Intel team that developed the first Pentium processor is working on the P7, and they are doing it with some assistance from engineers at Hewlett-Packard Corp.

Like the PowerPC, the P7 will incorporate a technology that allows the chip to operate with fewer instructions. The technology, called reduced instruction set computing, or RISC, is complex. But the bottom line for computer users is that the RISC chips are blazing fast compared to today's chips.

So what will we be doing with these new machines?

According to Dataquest, the buzzword will be "video." That's not such a surprise if you've been following the cable-television industry. It seems to be losing interest in interactive television and shifting its focus to PCs and the Internet.

Its plan: to use its cables to provide high-speed on-ramps to the Internet. There are lots of technical questions, such as how to provide two-way traffic on the heretofore-one-way cables. But it looks like the future PCs will be ready to handle the flow at their end, at least according to Dataquest.

The new PCs will have enough video compression capability to let you store your favorite movie - or the latest corporate training video - right on the hard drive.

It's hard to say whether many people will think it's a good idea to watch a movie on their PCs, which usually are not set up in warm and cozy places.

On the other hand, with the technology moving the way it is, it doesn't seem as though it will be either impractical or expensive to send those movies over a wire within your house to an extra monitor - looking very much like today's television - in the den.

Taking that notion a step further, Compaq Computer Co. and others have begun work on a home "server" that will connect the various computers around the house of tomorrow. You might be able not only to send that movie to the den, but set the temperature in the oven from your desktop.

Dataquest says the new machines will allow easy capture and editing of movies, as well as the use of video telephones.

The futuristic machines will be equipped for new telephone connections, which would be several times faster than today's computer modems. Modems are used to transfer data between machines over the telephone lines.

The new phone lines - called ISDN, for integrated service digital network - allow simultaneous transmission of voice and data signals over a single phone line at much higher speeds than is possible with conventional systems.

Many industry watchers are wondering whether ISDN will be fast enough to satisfy future appetites for video communications; thus the move by the cable companies.

One variable projection by Dataquest is hard-drive storage. The firm estimates it will be 10 gigabytes, or about 8 to 10 times the size of most hard drives sold today.