| April 19, 1999 |
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By Dean Takahashi
April 16, 1999
Wall Street Joural
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Intel Corp. has used many tactics to
protect its patents. But the chip maker recently
countered a rival patent claim with a maneuver unusual
enough to anger a Texas bankruptcy judge and surprise
some experts in legal ethics. The giant semiconductor
maker secretly used a shell company in the Cayman Islands
to argue on its behalf in the federal bankruptcy case of
International Meta Systems Inc., a tiny El Segundo,
Calif., computer-chip-design company. As part of the
Chapter 11 proceedings, now under way in Austin, the
Cayman company challenged IMS's sale last year of a
patent to a Northbrook, Ill., law firm called TechSearch
LLC. The law firm is using the patent as the basis of a
separate patent-infringement suit against Intel, now
pending in federal court in San Francisco.
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By John G. Spooner
April 16, 1999
PC Week Online
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Intel Corp. is gearing up for its next
Celeron processor, slated to hit the street late this
month. Accompanying the new 466MHz chip will be a new
chip set, called the 810 (formerly code-named Whitney),
which integrates such features as graphics and audio to
lower costs.
While the new Celeron will be available almost
immediately from OEMs, the chip set won't ship until
June, sources said. Intel (Nasdaq:INTC) is announcing the
two at the same time because they are designed to work
together, the sources said. It's also no secret that
Advanced Micro Devices Inc.(NYSE:AMD) will ship its first
AMD K-7 chips in June.
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By Richard Richtmyer
April 16, 1999
Electronic Buyers' News
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Analog Devices Inc. and Intel Corp.'s
joint effort to develop a next-generation DSP-core
architecture is on track, and products based on the new
architecture should be available in about one year,
according to Maria Tagliaferro, marketing manager for
ADI's DSP programs. The two companies forged their
partnership in early February, promising to deliver a new
design that uses ADI's 16-bit DSP core as a “starting
place” to create a fixed-point, low-power,
cost-competitive core.
The effort is being spearheaded by a combined
ADI/Intel design team that has been formed in Austin,
Tex. The new core will be used within integrated ICs
targeted at embedded communications and computing
applications, such as Internet-enabled cellular
telephones. Each company will separately market and sell
the products.
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April 16, 1999
ZD Net News
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The Federal Trade Commission will have a
difficult time enforcing its proposed antitrust
settlement with microchip giant Intel Corp., says the
sole agency commissioner who opposed the government's
original complaint against the company. FTC
Commissioner Orson Swindle, the dissenter in the 3-1 vote
last summer, also expressed doubt on whether the
government would have won its lawsuit had it not settled
with the company in March.
"Given my reservations about the merits of the
complaint, I would be more concerned about the order,
comprising a difficult-to-enforce mandate to 'sin no
more,' with a major proviso and some significant
exceptions, if it seemed likely to impose real and
significant restrictions on Intel," Swindle said in
a written statement released Thursday.
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| The Register Files |
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April 16, 1999
The Register
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Sometimes, we think that local New York
paper The Wall Street Journal is too worthy by half. But,
on occasions they write really good stuff. Credit where
credit's due.
The newspaper has just published a fab story showing
that Intel set up a shell Cayman Island company in order
to get hold of some patents it wanted.
In the course of so doing, it really cheesed off a
Texan judge trying to wind up the affairs of a company
called International Meta.
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By Mike Magee
April 16, 1999
The Register
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We promised yesterday that we'd post the
URLs we discovered on the World Wide Web that seem to
give benchmarks for Intel's Coppermine and AMD's K7
chips. The data is at Stanford University but quite
frankly we find it quite bewildering.
However, a kindly reader has pointed us to this Ars
Technica article which is helpful. The benchmarks are
SPEC benchmarks, he said.
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By Tony Smith
April 16, 1999
The Register
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Intel is to introduce what it's calling
a "memory hub" to allow PC vendors using its
upcoming Camino chipset to use PC100 SDRAM in place of
next-generation Rambus Direct DRAM while RDRAM parts
remain thin on the ground. According to News.com, the
memory hub technology will allow a Pentium III to operate
a system bus clock speed of 133MHz but access the memory
at slower speeds to retain compatibility with the current
memory spec.
However, Intel is also known to be working on a
'S-RIMM' technology, which allows PC100 SDRAM chips to be
placed on a RAMBUS Inline Memory Module, as reported by
The Register earlier this year.
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By Mike Magee
April 16, 1999
The Register
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FTC commissioners involved in the
accusation that Intel holds a monopoly in the chip market
have given some of their reasons for settling with the
chip giant. In a statement on the FTC Web site, Robert
Pitofsky, Sheila Anthony and Mozelle Thompson review the
decision while commissioner Orson Swindle, who dissented
against issuing the complaint last year, claimed the case
was hard to prove and will be difficult to enforce.
Swindle claims in his statement that while "Intel
has long bestrode the market" for microprocessors,
there is doubt whether the market "is as
unassailable" as the complaint suggested.
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By Mike Magee
April 18, 1999
The Register
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The good ship Intel is developing leaks
across the world and the latest holes in its hull are the
AGP Pro specification and the 810, 810e and 820 chips
specifications. If you go to Kbench, you'll see all
sorts of delicious details about the AGP Pro slot
specification. The information is in Korean but the
diagrams are in English.
And if that's not enough for you, try the same site,
but this time go to Kbench again, where this time you'll
find some juicy info about the 810, 810E and 820
chipsets.
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By Mike Magee
April 18, 1999
The Register
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Just after last Christmas, adverts
started appearing in the UK press for Celeron processors,
with an egg-related theme. The ads may have run
elsewhere than in the UK, and showed eggs in an eggbox,
each branded with the Intel Inside logo.
At the time, we dismissed this as just another bit of
Intel tomfoolery but it has occurred to us since Easter
that we were deeply mistaken.
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By Mike Magee
April 18, 1999
The Register
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One swallow does not make a Spring here
in the UK, nor does one picture of a daughterboard make a
Cyrix 370 pin CPU. We said this would happen at the
beginning of this year. (Stories: Cyrix decides to socket
and see and Cyrix to go 370 pin in April)
But over at Akiba, we do have a very nice and clear
picture of a 370-pin socket on a daughterboard with
wording on it which indicates support for both Intel and
Cyrix chips.
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