New processors from Intel: The race goes on

New processors from Intel: The race goes on

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Christanto Suryadarma from Intel Indonesia has a
story to tell. He called someone at an oil company in Jakarta,
and when the telephone operator asked him his company, Pak Chris
replied briefly, "I'm from Intel". The silence that ensued made
him realize what the operator must have been thinking, so he
quickly explained that he was from Intel Corporation, not the
other "intel" (colloquial here for intelligence authorities.)

Well, can you believe it? During this difficult time, even the
operator at an oil company, who may not have had the chance to
read Andy Grove's book Only the Paranoid Survive, seemed quite
concerned when someone from "Intel" called his company.

Grove may have stepped down and pass the leadership baton to
Craig Barret, but Intel Corporation seems to stick to his law for
survival. The paranoid naturally cannot even stop to look around.
All they want to do is run faster, and faster.

Like the Pentium II Processors, now at 350 and even 400 MHz.

Last week, Intel Indonesia showed off one of their latest
processors to a room full of journalists. A couple of demo
applications were run, and the one which I really liked showed a
360-degree view of a city block.

Pak Didik from Intel told the audience that no less than 11
cameras fed the video images to the PC, and it really required
the 350 MHz power to stitch them together in real time.

Acer, Dell, GTC, HP, Mugen, Siemens Nixdorf and Zyrex also
showcased their PCs that ran on the Pentium II 350 MHz. Acer even
had their first Pentium II-based notebook on display.

Intel also has good news for those of us who simply want to
get our jobs done. Their Celeron processor is finally here, and
it promises a 266 MHz machine for about US$1,200. Intel calls
such a machine the "Basic PC".

Segments

Apart from those with money to burn, those who would buy the
Pentium II 400 MHz processor, under the brand name of Xeon, are
clearly people whose job requires a workstation power.

They may include professionals involved in multimedia content
creation, engineering design, GIS imaging and other processor-
intensive jobs.

The performance gap between high-end workstation using RISC
processors from Sun Microsystems and Digital and high-end
workstation based on Intel processors has narrowed progressively
since the introduction of the early generations of Pentium II.

Applications have also been transported from the expensive
UNIX workstations to Intel-based workstations. This has brought
the really powerful workstation closer to the masses.

The high-end processors can also be the right choice if you
need an enterprise server, although you may want to wait for the
64-bit Merced processor for really high-end servers.

If you want the so-called "performance" PC -- a machine that
is powerful enough to run 3-D graphics and animation found in a
growing number of today's edutainment software packages --
Pentium II Processors with speeds of 266 MHz to 300 MHz would be
sufficient.

However, for corporations and home business owners who just
need, say, a Mazda Vantrend, the Celeron would fit their need
nicely. Celeron is a brand name, just like Pentium.

The Celeron processor is actually a 266 MHz Pentium II
processor without its Level 2 cache.

People in the industry usually compare this cache with your
refrigerator. You could imagine how miserable life would be if
that box broke down. I guess the high clock speed of Celeron
would compensate for the missing fridge, and because it is based
on the Pentium II it also incorporates the MMX Technology.

Coworkers

What do you have to keep in mind when choosing or assembling a
system with these processors? To enable the processor to work
most efficiently, you also need to hire the right "coworkers".

If you choose the Pentium II 400 processors, for example, you
will need a motherboard that offers a 100 MHz bus speed. This is
a new spec; older motherboards usually run at 66 MHz at the max.

The new motherboard from Siemens Nixdorf, the D1064, for
instance, has a bus that can be set to both 66 MHz and 100 MHz.
The 50 percent speed increase means a wider toll-road for data
traveling from processor and the other components of the system.

The other coworker for the Pentium II 350 MHz or 400 MHz
processor is the 440BX chipset that supports Accelerated Graphics
Ports (AGP) -- the new graphic bus that offers faster data
transfer from the system to the display sub-system. The new
chipset also allows you to equip your PC with up to one gig of
RAM, which is not too exorbitant for an application server.

The Celeron processor should be used with motherboards that
have Intel 440EX chipset. This new one also supports AGP and will
allow you to add up to 256 MB of RAM.

Keep in mind that a computer system is just like any work
organization; best results cannot be expected if you have only
one or two star performers and a bunch of mediocre coworkers.