Microprocessor Watch

Editor: Michael Slater
Contributors: Keith Diefendorff, Peter Glaskowsky, Kevin Krewell

In This Issue:

• IBM's Power4 Wins Microprocessor Report Technology Award
• Transmeta Unveils Crusoe
• Media Processors Redefined
• Hitachi, UMC Jump On 12" Wafers

IBM's Power4 Wins Microprocessor Report Technology Award

Cahners MicroDesign Resources today announced that the IBM Power4 is first the winner of its prestigious new Microprocessor Report Technology Award, honoring the most promising microprocessor technology disclosed in 1999. The winner was chosen by Microprocessor Report's staff of respected technology analysts and presented during MDR's Processing the Future 2000 industry forecast and award dinner.

Finalists for the award, in alphabetical order, included Compaq Alpha 21264, HAL Sparc 64 V, Intel Itanium, Sony/Toshiba Emotion Engine and Sun MAJC. Nominated technologies for the new Microprocessor Report Technology Award embody the potential to substantially improve the performance of the systems in which they are used.

"IBM's Power4 integrates a simply awesome collection of technologies, including chip multiprocessing (CMP), which is potentially the industry's most significant new microarchitecture," said Keith Diefendorff, Microprocessor Report Editor-in-Chief. "With its two 64-bit cores, 45 GB/s memory bandwidth, and wave-pipelined I/O interface, the Power4 points the way toward the future of the industry."

Transmeta Unveils Crusoe

After nearly five years of hiding its activities from public scrutiny, Transmeta has finally opened its kimono, revealing what it claims is a revolutionary approach to x86 CPU design--the "chip" is half hardware and half software. Despite persistent rumors of low frequency and poor performance, the startup company has managed to create two chips with some pretty attractive features. The most notable feature is low power: the 700-MHz TM5400 is said to have the performance of a 500-MHz Pentium III but to dissipate only one watt of power in typical use, a feature that will appeal to makers of today's thin-and-light notebooks and tomorrow's mobile Internet devices. --K.D.

Media Processors Redefined

Media processors--which in 1995 seemed to point the way to a bright new future for advanced microprocessor architectures-- almost burned out in 1998. Indeed, Microprocessor Report did not even run a 1998 year-in-review article for media processors, because there was little to say. Apart from Philips's announcement of a new TriMedia core and the November debut of Equator's MAP-1000, the focus that year was on host-based media processing in the form of Intel's MMX, PowerPC's AltiVec, AMD's 3DNow, and similar instruction-set extensions for other general- purpose processors.

Much has changed in the past year. Complete new media-processor architectures have been introduced by Cradle, Fujitsu, Sony, and Sun. New members of the TriMedia and Equator families have been announced, and an entirely new class of processors has appeared to accelerate networking products.

With new applications such as networking, higher expectations from video-game OEMs, and restored opportunities in the PC platform, this market has never been stronger. The success of individual competitors is far from assured, of course. Competition in the network-processor niche is exceptionally strong, especially given the participation of industry heavyweights such as Intel and IBM.

There seems to be plenty of investment money available for media- processor development, so it won't be necessary for vendors to make much money in the next year or two. With potential customers to chase and funds to fuel R&D, the vendors are sure to make great progress--and great products--in the media-processor market during the coming years. --P.N.G.

Hitachi, UMC Jump On 12" Wafers

Hitachi and UMC have announced a $600-million joint-venture to build a new 7,000 wafer per week 300-mm wafer fab. The new facility will begin production in the first half of 2001, well ahead of Intel's planned 300-mm facility. --K.D.