By Kelly Spang,
Segmentation of the computing market from the sub-$1,000 PC up to high-end servers has been a central theme at the Intel Developer Forum held in San Jose.
"The most exciting part is that the emergence of the high end as well as the low end is where the major opportunities are," said Albert Yu, senior vice president and general manager of the microprocessor product group at Intel. "As a result, we have developed our strategy to supply products to all segments of the market."
This is a departure from the previous Intel strategy where technology was introduced at the high end and filtered down to the lower end of the PC market.
"This [strategy] is no longer appropriate," Yu said.
At the low end, Yu detailed Covington, a 266-MHz Pentium II processor without any Level 2 cache, as well as Mendocino, code-named for the Pentium II with onboard Level 2 cache.
Mendocino, which is expected to incorporate 128 kilobytes of Level 2 cache on the chip with speeds ranging from 266 MHz to 300 MHz, is due out on the fourth quarter, said industry sources.
Intel is further exploring "smart integration" where graphics capabilities and memory functions are integrated onto the CPU die in some way, Yu said.
This integrated product, yet to be announced, will target markets even lower than Covington, which Intel executives expect to appear in PCs priced as low as $700.
Intel rival Cyrix already integrates system functions onto its MediaGX processors, which target systems priced as low as $500.
Tomorrow's keynote speaker at the Intel Developer Forum will be Pat Gelsinger, vice president of Intel's business desktop product group.
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