Picking the Winners for 2002

define categories that give us a good selection of competitors, announce our nominees, and finally—at a special dinner event early the following year—announce the winners of the Microprocessor Report Analysts' Choice Awards.

All these awards are associated with year-in-review articles that will appear in MPR shortly after the awards ceremony. The articles drive the awards process: if we need an article to explain what's been going on in a market segment during the course of the year, we believe the best example of a processor in that segment deserves an award. We'll publish our list of nominees soon, but I'd like to go through the categories now. We've chosen ten categories this year, using as a basis market and technical issues. Each category reflects a particularly competitive segment of the overall microprocessor market.

PC processors in 2002 represent a broad range of design optimizations. There are chips designed to deliver maximum performance, low power consumption, excellent price/performance, and the lowest possible cost. Deciding which of these characteristics means the most in today's PC industry is tantamount to picking a winner. Intel's Pentium 4 won this award last year, but the market has changed since then. Is Pentium 4 the best product for the market today? Our PC-processor analyst, Kevin Krewell, will explain our thinking in his PC-market year-in-review article in January.

Server processors generally focus on maximum performance for server applications, such as database queries and Web-page delivery over the Internet. Even so, server processors reflect a variety of design goals. Furthermore, server CPUs are the last bastion of the old RISC-versus-CISC debate, now with additional competition from EPIC products. IBM's Power4 won this award for 2001, but some significant new products have been introduced since then. Kevin also covers this area, so look forward to his analysis after the awards are announced.

High-performance embedded systems support the greatest amount of differentiation among high-volume commercial microprocessors. There are RISC and CISC cores, SIMD and VLIW math accelerators, and instruction sets galore. A year ago, we gave a joint award to Motorola's MPC 7455 and Broadcom's BCM1250, but the competition will be even more intense this year. Picking a winner in this area won't be easy, but under the guidance of Markus Levy, MPR's primary analyst for this segment, we'll sort it all out for you.

Low-power embedded applications put the greatest emphasis on efficient circuit design. In picking a winner among low-power embedded CPUs, we have to consider issues such as leakage current that simply aren't an issue in our other categories. In-Stat/MDR principal analyst Max Baron covers this topic area for us, and he'll explain our thinking behind this year's award.

Max is also our primary analyst for extreme processors, an umbrella term I coined for CPUs that deliver extraordinary levels of performance for application-specific processing. We're not giving an Analysts' Choice award for DSPs this year, in part because we believe that, during 2002, extreme processors have made more interesting progress.

Tom Halfhill, back in the MPR fold following his sojourn with ARC Cores, will be analyzing intellectual property (IP) core offerings for 2002 and managing the associated awards. Last year, we considered the 20Kc core from MIPS the best of these items; this year will likely be different. Tom has an excellent understanding of these products, and we're all looking forward to his analysis of them.

For 2002, we'll be doing a year-in-review article and an Analysts' Choice award for graphics processors. Last year, we gave the nod to the combination of Intel's Pentium III and Nvidia's XGU/MCPX chip set, the basis of Microsoft's Xbox, as the best 3D-gaming platform. This year, we'll be looking at discrete PC-graphics chips because, for the first time ever, there are several truly programmable 3D-rendering engines to compare and evaluate. With graphics processors—GPUs—now rivaling CPUs for complexity and manufacturing cost, the importance of these chips to system designers and end users has never been greater.

I'll also be reviewing the related markets for network and security processors, which, more than any other type of CPU, reflect the trend toward application-specific processor design. The chips we'll consider this year will be more than four times faster than the fastest examples from 2001—an impressive speedup. We'll have awards in both these categories, as we did last year when IBM's PowerNP NP4GS3 and Corrent's CR7020 took home the honors.

The Microprocessor Report Technology Award is the one exception to our usual rule. This award could well be given to a technology not yet in commercial use. In past years, we've given this award to products that were announced but not yet shipping, such as IBM's Power 4, as well as to scientific research projects like extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which one day will become crucial to microprocessor designers. Last year, the Technology Award went to Intel's Hyper-Threading technology, because of its important contributions to the company's current products as well as its potential for the future. I look forward to passing along the combined insights of our analyst team and editorial board on this subject.

Although the Analysts' Choice awards provide a certain amount of excitement, the real value to you—our readers, our customers—comes from our analysis of the underlying issues that make one product or technology more important than others. I would appreciate whatever guidance you can offer in evaluating the nominees in each of these categories. Just drop me an email, and I'll make sure it gets distributed to the rest of the analyst team.