Industry News
By Mike Menkedick
New High Powered Processors Available
Intel and AMD have recently released some new CPU products. AMD has released the K6 CPU, and Intel has released the Pentium Pro II.
The AMD K6 is a Pentium clone CPU with MMX compatibility. The CPU currently comes in 166 and 200 MHz speeds. MMX capability gives the K6 about 50 more opcodes specifically designed for multimedia applications. The K6 was released in April and has been a hot product. At Mirad Computers, we have sold a few units when they were first released but now the CPU is difficult to obtain. Supply and demand has caused AMD to raise prices $100.00 per CPU since it was first released.
Intel has just released the Pentium Pro II CPU. This CPU adds MMX capability to the Pentium Pro line. The Pentium Pro II has an internal 32K (L1) cache and supports a 512K (L2) cache. A future Penitum Pro II, expected to be released the third quarter of this year will support a 1M cache. The Pentium Pro II will be available in speeds of 233 MHz, 266 MHz, and 300 MHz. The Pentium Pro family also features a dual independent bus. This bus can be run by the CPU as two independent buses or combined for simultaneous parallel transactions.
As reported on the Internet, and confirmed rapidly by Intel, the Pentium Pro family has a bug. (History Lesson - recall the Pentium had a similar flaw, but Intel denied the bug for a long time.) The bug, or "erratum", as defined by Intel, is a floating-point conversion problem similar to the earlier Pentium problem. The bug can be corrected by software, and will be fixed in future silicon CPU releases. See Intel's homepage for more details.
The Future of Hard Drive Technology
Seagate Technology has predicted advances in hard drive technology will make 15 GB hard drives in a 3.5" box available by the year 2000. Advances in storage technology made 5 MB drives available in 1980. Currently 23 GB hard drives are available in 5.25-inch drives. "The number is going to keep going up" stated Aric Menon of Seagate.
Quick Bytes