Competitors Circumvent Slot 1
By Lisa DiCarlo in San Jose, Calif., PC Week
May 22, 1998 2:03 PM PDT

Two of Intel Corp.'s rivals are taking dramatically different approaches to compete
against the company's proprietary Slot 1 bus interface.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which will announce its K6-2 this week, will base all of its
next-generation processors (starting with the K7 next year) on Digital Equipment
Corp.'s 21264 Alpha bus. Centaur Technology Inc. will eliminate the system bus
altogether in its next-generation processor, the C7.

Neither company will design chips based on Slot 1, even though they each have a
license to do so through separate foundry agreements with IBM's Microelectronics
Division.

Next year, AMD will release at least two versions of the K7: one for servers and one for
desktops, said Dana Krelle, vice president of marketing at AMD, in Austin, Texas. Both
versions will be based on the Alpha bus.

It will kick off the battle with Intel for the desktop next week, when it releases its first
nonclone product, the K6-2. That chip has 21 three-dimensional instructions, called
3DNow.

Although Intel has integrated multimedia instructions in MMX, 3-D instructions are not
expected until mid-1999, under a project code-named Katmai.

"This is the biggest advantage [an Intel] competitor has ever had," said Michael Slater,
founder of MicroDesign Resources Inc., in Sebastopol, Calif. "It is also the first
meaningful feature advantage."

The K6-2 will be available in 266MHz, 300MHz and 333MHz versions, priced at $185,
$281 and $369, respectively, in 1,000-unit quantities.

In the second half of this year, AMD will introduce the K6-3 with integrated Level 2
cache. AMD is positioning the chip squarely against Intel's Katmai processors in the
"performance PC" space.

AMD is also designing processors for portables--a market Intel has had almost
completely to itself for years.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is tiny Centaur, the Austin, Texas, design
subsidiary of Integrated Device Technology Inc.

Glenn Henry, Centaur's president, says the company is focused exclusively on
delivering products for the sub-$1,000 PC market, which drove it to design
next-generation processors without a system bus.

"System buses add cost and create a bottleneck," Henry said. "So rather than get
involved in a bus argument, we will remove it."

As an alternative, Centaur next year will release processors with integrated memory,
which he says eliminates the need for a pipeline between the memory and the chip.