Intel's Chairman Makes Rare Appearance In Taiwan

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May 11, 1998 (3:04 PM EDT)

Intel's Chairman Makes Rare Appearance In Taiwan

By Sandy Chen,

Hoping to build a more solid foundation with Taiwan's PC and board makers, Intel chairman Andrew S. Grove made a rare appearance Monday on the island to drum up support for the company's current and future processor lines.

Speaking at the opening ceremonies of Intel's (company profile) annual Technology Forum event in Taipei, Grove outlined Intel's future, Pentium II processor road map, showing everything from a low-end, Celeron chip running at 333 MHz to a high-end multiprocessing unit called Xeon running more than 500 MHz. There were really no surprises concerning Intel's future road map, but the real blockbuster was the appearance of Grove himself in Taiwan.

Grove, who last week was in China, has not been to Taiwan in about 10 years despite the fact that the island's PC and board makers have been Intel's best -- and sometimes worst -- customers. Today, Taiwan is the world's manufacturing center for the hottest product in the PC industry -- the sub-$1,000 computer. Compaq, IBM, and other major original equipment manufacturers are sourcing their sub-$1,000 PCs in Taiwan.

The only problem for Intel, however, is many of the sub-$1,000 PCs in the market are built around non-Intel MPUs. Recently, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel struck back and rolled out its processor for low-cost systems, called Celeron. However, the response for the Celeron chip has been lukewarm in the worldwide PC industry, including Taiwan.

Still, Grove realizes he needs Taiwan's support to get Celeron into the mass markets, while also heading off competition from Advanced Micro Devices, Cyrix, and others. Intel and Taiwan "are really engaged in exactly the same mission in building a low-cost, modern computer world," Grove said in a speech. "We are like a big family."