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Intel,
the world’s biggest computer-chip maker, will unveil
new microprocessors, including one for data networking equipment,
at its conference for software and hardware developers later
this month. The network processor and a related semiconductor
that directs information in and out of the guts of networking
gear will both be based on Intel’s XScale architecture,
which it is pushing as a standard in both the wireless and
networking industries, spokeswoman Christine Chartier said.
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Craig
Barrett
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At
the Intel Developer Forum, the Santa Clara, California, company
will also announce new Xeon processors that are the brains
of powerful server computers that serve up Web pages and comprise
computer networks. The company will also announce that it
will resume manufacturing chipsets for Xeon processors, which
it stopped doing in early 2000, Chartier said. The chipsets
connect the processor to memory chips and the rest of a server
computer.
Executives will also tout Intel’s forthcoming McKinley
processor, which is due to be available to customers by the
middle of this year. McKinley is the successor to the Itanium
processor, Intel’s first chip that crunches data in chunks
of 64 bits at a time, compared with the 32 bits that Intel’s
Pentium and Xeon chips do. But the number of McKinley chips
sold will be far less than the number of desktop and laptop
PC processors that Intel sells, although they will sell for
far higher prices, on average.
For years, rivals Sun Microsystems and International Business
Machines have sold their own 64-bit chips, which are used
in very powerful computers.
Chief executive, Craig Barrett, on February 25 will kick off
the San Francisco conference with an address on the state
of the telecommunications and computer industry. The conference,
which runs through February 28, is expected to draw about
4,000 people, the same number who attended Intel’s conference
last fall.
Reuters
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