John Galea's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference 98 Summary

Rather than repeat the Intel strategy and direction I refer you to my Intel Developer Forum Summary.

Operating System Topics

Windows 98

now includes native support for MMX, and AGP video cards
availability is Q298
Win 98 uses 32MB of total memory with an additional 2 MB for networking. 8 MB of memory is non-swappable.

NT 5.0

Beta 2 for NT 5.0 is Q298
MS have spent a fair bit of time focusing on Total Cost of Ownership and believe NT 5 will reduce TCO by as much as 54% compared to Win 3.1 through Plug and Play, Zero Administration for Windows and other features.
NT 5 will continue to support Digital Alpha
Multi processor support grows to 32
NT 5 will include DirectX 6.0 allowing games to be played on NT!
NT 5.0 will be a MAJOR releasing including Plug and Play hardware detection, power management and many improvements
MS are recommending 64MB Min for NT 5.0
Intel processor competition including AMD and Cyrix have gained some market share, but lost money doing so.

General topics

Intel processor competition including AMD and Cyrix have gained some market share, but lost money doing so.

the number of PCs in the home given the current usability problems is a clear definition of how high a pain threshold users have really become!

CPUs have outgrown mainstream business applications to such an extent that most people do not need anywhere near the high end of available processors allowing a new market segment of low cost PCs which actually use current rather than obsolete technology.

Here is a breakdown of the cost of the various parts that make up a PC today.

Survey of under $1000 PC users showed

  1) games                        65%
  2) Internet                     58%
  3) Word Processing Spreadsheet  58%
  4) Education and Learning       56%
  5) Email                        51%
  6) Work at home                 45%

home networking including RF, wired and telephone or power line carriers were discussed extensively to allow file sharing, device sharing and TCPIP access.

PC99 recommends no ISA slots. ISA is seen as a major contributor to support calls, and alledged to be a major peformance detractor, however the industry today does not have solutions for the current users of ISA including serial, parallel, floppy disk, audio, joystick, mouse and keyboard. Some have solutions today, but not all.

DirectX 6 will include support for 3D being implemented by Cyrix, AMD and fully exploit Pentium II.

it was commented on that 3D Winbench from Ziff Davis has in many cases been unrepresentitive of the real use of 3D applications such that hardware that performs well on 3D Winbench performs badly on real world 3D applications (games). Sorry but there are still very few compelling reasons for 3D other than games.

after the pie attack Bill Gates suffered there was a noticeable increase in security during his presentation.

AMD have announced what they call Super7 which is Socket 7 100MHZ AGP and will be supported by Via and ALI. SiS are supporting AGP but not 100MHZ. The AMD 3D and 3D+ will support the 100MHZ bus. AMD 3D increases speed of MMX and AMD 3D+ integrates a 256K L2. AMD L1 cache is 64K Vs. 32K for Intel Pentium MMX.

Cyrix GX/MMX up to 200MHZ which includes SDRAM support.

in comparing performance using Intel's own numbers there is less than a 2 to 1 performance gain between the slowest current processor Pentium 200 and the fastest Pentium II 333 but the price delta is huge. Also worth noting is that a Pentium II 233 is really only 25% faster than a 233 Pentium MMX.

Also worth noting a Mobile Pentium 233 MMX costs $369 Vs $193 for the same processor in desktop form. Worth noting is that nobody but Intel has processors in the mobile market place today.

Intel owned 85% of the processor market in 97 and roughly 15% of those were Pentium II.

Intel own 100% of the Pentium II chipset business, that is to say no one has a chipset for Pentium II based processors.

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