Coming: one chip that works like two

By Anand Parthasarathy

KOCHI, SEPT. 2. ``Parallel processing'' will take on a whole new meaning, when technology unveiled this week, translates into real chips. At its semi-annual Developer Forum, now ongoing at San Jose, California, in the United States, engineers from Intel, the world's number one computer chip-maker, demonstrated a new design that enables a single physical processor to logically function like two - by chopping up the data handled, into parallel streams.

The technology called ``Hyperthreading'', will first be available in Intel's top-of-the-line Xeon processor chip for PC-servers, by 2002, and a year later in the mass market desktop chips such as Pentium.

In a keynote address, Mr. Paul Otellini, executive vice-president of Intel's Architecture Group, said the technology made use of some under-used circuitry in the Pentium 4 chip and made it work like two Pentium 4s.

In effect, this would fool the PC's operating system into running two different applications simultaneously and independently. Hitherto this has been possible only by linking two separate chips back-to-back as dual processors.

Researchers cautioned that the hyperthreaded chip would not quite equal the performance of two separate chips - but by squeezing the maximum performance from the chip it would bring down operating costs.

Also this week, Intel announced availability of the first Pentium-4s to clock at 2 gigahertz - the highest in the chip industry today. It also unveiled its fastest chip in the Celeron range, that would enable the budget PCs, popular in India to work at 1 GHz or 1.1 GHz clock speed. Almost as a reaction, AMD whose chips clone Intel architecture - at lower prices - announced an almost 40 percent price cut for its global Athlon and Duron range: the surest proof that in this intense ``chip war'', ``The Customer is King''.

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Section  : National
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