Our own Dennis Barker collaborated with Martin Heller to file the following
April 91
Microbytes report on Microsoft's operating system tap dance. In the sidebar that follows, former Features Editor Ken Sheldon outlined Intel's predictions for their 21st-century microprocessor.
OS Shuffle Has Developers Dizzy
by Martin Heller and Dennis Barker
The spin doctors have been working overtime at Microsoft. The software giant and its sometimes-partner IBM reshuffled their operating-system responsibilities last year, with Microsoft keeping OS/2 3.0; there has since been widespread talk that Microsoft was neglecting OS/2 to design industrial-strength Windows. Then the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft is "dropping OS/2," an incorrect assumption that further confused developers and users.
Contrary to the "inaccurate speculations," Microsoft says that it will not abandon OS/2 t
o focus on 32-bit Windows. The company maintains that it is still working on a portable version of OS/2 called OS/2 3.0 (or OS/2 NT, for new technology) and that it is still working on OS/2 applications.
"We will have a high-end and a low-end operating system offering, while having a single mainstream programming interface for developers," a Microsoft staff member said. That interface is now the Windows 3.0 API (for application programming interface) but will eventually be the Win32 API, he said.
This "new-technology" operating system, targeted for client/server situations and multiprocessor systems, will incorporate what is being called Win32, an API in which 32-bit Windows programs can run directly under OS/2 3.0. Microsoft officials insist that OS/2 3.0 is not taking a back seat to Windows, but that it is rather a product for users who need something stronger than DOS. Although some industry insiders say that Microsoft is adding the Presentation Manager API only to appease IBM, a Microsoft repr
esentative said that "the PM subsystem has always been part of the product plans for OS/2 3.0."
An IBM official said that the Windows-or-PM scenario just confuses the issue. "It's not a question of user interface. It is a question of which operating environment will give you what you need. The choice is Windows on DOS, which is fine for personal applications, or the advanced capabilities of OS/2." So will IBM do Windows? In a recent internal memo on how to deal with questions about operating-system strategy, IBM said that it "is evaluating where Windows fits in the range of solutions available to our customers."
OS/2 3.0 is currently in the prealpha stage; sources say that it won't ship before 1992. Microsoft officials confirm that they've ported it to certain unnamed RISC machines; sources say that those machines are the IBM RISC System/6000 and computers based on the MIPS R3000 and the Intel i486 with the i860.
Many developers say that they think Microsoft and IBM are still sending mixed
signals. The perceived dispute between Microsoft and IBM is "damaging our ability to market products," said one. "We are facing a nightmare."
So what should developers do? That "depends on the technical and marketing requirements of their product," says Cam Myhrvold, manager of developer relations at Microsoft. "If people want to target the largest graphical desktop market, it is clear that Windows is the volume leader," he says. For the server market-place, it's OS/2.
And from our feature article "A Talk with Intel" comes this enlightening sidebar:
Micro 2000
: Intel engineers predict the shape of a twenty-first-century microprocessor
by Kenneth M. Sheldon
What will the microprocessor of tomorrow look like? According to Intel, it will be 10 times faster, have almost 100 times as many transistors, and incorporate more functions than the most powerful processors now available.
Las
t year, Intel engineers laid down the broad outlines for what they expect their leading microprocessor to look like in the year 2000. They drew on previous design experience, trends in chip fabrication, and expected advances in electronics technology to make their predictions. They called the
anticipated chip the Micro 2000
.
More Transistors
In 1975, Gordon Moore, chairman of Intel, predicted that the number of transistors that could be put on a chip would double every two years -- a prediction that has proved quite accurate. According to Moore's Law (as it has come to be called), the Micro 2000 could have more than 50 million transistors on-board -- 20,000 times as many as Intel's original 4004 chip had, and 40 times as many as the i486.
Memory chips, which tend to be more densely packed with transistors than logic chips are, have increased in capacity at roughly the same rate. If the trend toward integrating more memory functions onto microprocessors co
ntinues (as a way of eliminating data bottlenecks), the number of transistors on the Micro 2000 could reach 100 million.
More Megahertz
Cramming all those transistors onto one chip will mean making them a lot smaller. The transistors in the Micro 2000 will be 1/25 the size of current transistors, with a corresponding increase in the rate at which electrical current can be driven through them. The bottom line is that Intel expects the Micro 2000 to operate at a clock rate of 250 MHz.
Achieving that kind of speed will require developing new materials (e.g., tungsten) to interconnect transistors and new ways of arranging them (e.g., putting them in stacked multiple layers rather than a single large layer) to reduce the distance a signal has to travel.
More Power
What do you do with 100 million transistors? Intel engineers have detailed two possible scenarios for using them. The first is a high-performance multiprocessing chip (see the figure) that would
incorporate four CPUs, each with 4 million transistors, each able to perform at 700 million instructions per second. That's a total of over 2000 MIPS, or 2 BIPS (billion instructions per second) for the entire chip.
This version of the Micro 2000 would include two vector units to perform vector processing, a technique borrowed from Intel's i860 RISC chip (which borrowed it from supercomputers) to perform floating-point calculations at high speed. It would also have a 2-megabyte cache memory (compare that to the i486's 8K-byte cache) so that it won't often have to go off-board for data, as well as a graphics unit (made up of 4 million transistors) designed to provide high-resolution, HDTV-quality, full-motion graphics.
More Integration
The other possible design for the Micro 2000 would trade off some performance for even higher levels of integration; it would have only two CPUs, one vector unit, and a smaller cache. The remaining transistors would be used to incorporate on a si
ngle chip all the functions necessary for a personal computer.
Currently, the 386 microprocessor requires about as many transistors for support logic chips (250,000) as are on the chip itself (275,000). Extrapolating from that, Intel has allocated 8 million transistors for "miscellaneous PC" functions, such as controlling disk drives and memory and communicating with other systems. Engineers have also allotted 8 million transistors for the Human Interface Unit, which they admit is a black box: a yet-to-be-designed device that will make computers easier to use than ever before, perhaps by incorporating such technologies as speech recognition.
Compatibility
Ah, but all this new technology means we'll have to throw out all our old software, right? Not so, says Intel.
Intel claims that the Micro 2000 will continue to be upwardly compatible with the 386 and will run all software that currently runs on that processor. Of course, the availability of so much additional raw comput
ing power could pave the way for new applications that make current programs look antiquated.
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Kenneth M. Sheldon is BYTE's senior editor for features. He can be reached on BIX as "ksheldon."
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