Intel’s Secret Weapon Computer Chip Maker Challenges Competition With P6 Microprosessor

The way Intel has kept it under wraps, you’d think the P6 was a tactical bomber rather than a computer chip.

In fact, the new processor is a key weapon in the Santa Clara, Calif., company’s battle to remain the dominant supplier of the engines that drive personal computers.

Thursday, Intel took the wraps off its latest creation, which has been developed in secrecy in Hillsboro, Ore. The picture that emerged was of a chip capable of processing information twice as fast as the the most powerful member of Intel’s flagship Pentium line.

Scheduled to ship in the second half of this year, the P6 promises to do what the Pentium did before it - give Intel a temporary stranglehold on the high end of the chip market.

The new chip initially will be earmarked for servers - machines that control networks - and for expensive, top-end PCs. As chip prices drop, it will start appearing in PCs for the home market.

Intel officials declined to estimate the price of the P6. The first Pentiums sold at wholesale for just under $1,000.

With 5.5 million transistors (against 3.1 million in the Pentium), the P6 promises to help speed up power-hungry multimedia applications that produce sound, video and 3-D graphics.

Intel’s advantage in the chip wars may not be as clear-cut as it once was, however. Rival Advanced Micro Devices, using technology similar to that of the P6, is putting its own secret weapon, the K5, through testing now with plans to have it on the market late this year.

The first K5s, running at 100 megahertz, will not be as speedy as the P6, which will run at 133 MHz. But AMD officials claim they will outperform comparably priced Pentiums (the fastest Pentium today goes at 100 MHz).

“Clock-speed for clock-speed, the K5 is going to give at least 30 percent higher performance than the Pentium,” said Dirk Heinin, a marketing manager for Sunnyvale-based AMD.

If that holds true, AMD stands to gain market share.

Both the P6 and K5 embrace some aspects of RISC technology, an advanced design approach used in most workstations as well as Apple’s Power Macintoshes. RISC stands for reduced instruction set computing.

Intel officials have shied away from using the term RISC, preferring to tout what they call P6’s “dynamic execution,” a system that keeps information flowing rapidly through the chip with no bottlenecks.

John Hyde, technical marketing manager for Intel’s P6 division, said PCs using the chip will rival workstations that typically sell for thousands of dollars more. But that claim drew fire from Sun Microsystems, the leading maker of workstations, which plans to ship its latest RISC chip, the Ultrasparc, later this year.

“The raw performance of the Ultrasparc will be higher, and we believe in real-life applications it will way outperform the P6,” said Anant Agrawal, vice president of engineering for Sparc technology at Sun.

Intel officials went out of their way to emphasize that they have taken steps to ensure that the mathematical flaw that besmirched the Pentium will not be a problem with the P6.

“We’ve spent 15 times as many simulation cycles in the verification of the P6 as we did on the Pentium.,” said Randy Steck, development manager for the P6