Latest chip adds extra dimension to graphics

By ADAM GIFFORD

Intel is looking for New Zealand companies working on technologies that suit its IA-64 architecture, the computing platform that uses its new generation of 64-bit chips.

It has been working for more than five years on IA-64, which will eventually replace the 32-bit Pentium chips now used for a large percentage of the world's computing.

The company's New Zealand general manager, Scott Gilmour, said Intel recently created an Intel 64 Fund, on a similar model to its other capital companies, which invest in software, communications and network companies or companies that use Intel chips.

"In each case they're looking to invest in companies which will advance the market to suck up Intel silicon," Mr Gilmour said.

In New Zealand, Virtual Spectator, which made the software that provided America's Cup graphics on the internet, benefited from Intel money and resources.

Another local company doing 3D graphics, Right Hemisphere, has also received Intel help, including use of workstations with some of Intel's new Itanium 64-bit chip.

William Wu, the IA-64 programme manager for Intel Asia Pacific, said IA-64 sales would be driven by e-business, which required systems with ever-bigger and faster processors to handle the increasing volumes of information from multiple sources.

IA-64 represents a ground-up rewrite of the technology, rather than being an extension of today's chips.

While Itanium and its successors will handle applications written for the instruction sets included on the 32-bit and earlier chips, there is also the potential for a huge number of instruction sets.

This will allow application developers to have work done on the chip which previously had to be done in software, meaning faster applications.

IA-64, with its three levels of cache, will allow large databases to be held in memory, speeding up many common tasks.

It is designed for easier linking of multiple processors.

The Itanium chips (known in development as Merced) are designed for EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing), as opposed to Cisc (complex instruction set computing, which includes the Pentium range), or Risc (reduced instruction set computing), which includes competitors such as Compaq's 64-bit Alpha chip, Sun's UltraSparc, which is dominating high-end Unix computing, and the Power PC chips made by Motorola and IBM.

Mr Wu said each Itanium chip could process 20 instructions simultaneously. Currently CPUs were idle 60 per cent of the time as they waited for something else to happen. EPIC allowed the software to predict what was likely to happen, so when the instruction was given, part of the work was already under way.

"It's like if I'm a cashier in a bank, and I see a long line of customers in front of me. I know someone up there will want to withdraw a deposit, so I can get the form ready between other tasks," Mr Wu said.

Itanium was better at handling floating-point calculations, making it suitable for scientific calculations.

This is one of the target markets, along with servers running databases, workstations, machines needed for graphic content creation and environmental and motion simulations.

Intel is pushing the security aspects of the new architecture. Its increased power will allow it to encrypt and decrypt information faster.

Intel also wants to increase its share of the server market for applications such as customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning, where rivals including IBM and Sun have a strong presence.

While it will be fighting for this market on performance, its major selling point is likely to be price. Intel will be bringing the economics of the PC industry to the application server space.

This means the huge volumes of chips it will produce for a multitude of uses will bring the price of the hardware needed for applications such as high-end graphics down from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of thousands.

Mr Wu said 5000 systems had been shipped so far to development partners, and a pilot release was planned for the last quarter of this year to innovators and early adopters.

General commercial acceptance of IA-64 is not expected until McKinley, the successor to Itanium, due in late 2001.

The Itaniums will initially run at 733 MHz and 800 MHz expected, with most of the available supply being in the slower speed. The test chips available so far have run at 500, 666 and 733 MHz.

And while Intel continues to work closely with Microsoft, which is developing a 64-bit Windows operating system, it also works closely with other operating system developers.

It has taken a strong interest in Linux, which is increasingly being recognised as a credible alternative to the high-end Unix flavours for many tasks and a more-than-capable competitor for Microsoft operating systems.

Intel recently posted the Itanium microarchitecture on the internet to make it easier for open-source programmers to build applications for the new chip.

It also connected Itanium-based servers to the internet so programmers can test-drive their software.

Intel is shipping its Pentium 4 processor in the fourth quarter. It includes NetBurst microarchitecture designed for running multimedia applications such as streaming audio and video, as well as for crunching the kind of algorithms used to encrypt data sent securely over the net.