Tomorrow's CPUs

The hard part will be choosing among major new chip platforms and families; easier to take will be the blazing speeds of tomorrow's processors.

Alan Joch

Conventional wisdom says that Intel dominates the desktop CPU market. But look at the company's development plans for the next year, and you'll see a corporation that's acting a lot more like a hyperactive start-up than a sleepy giant.

Why? The CPU decisions we make will fuel a fundamentally new battle among processor architects. Some RISC-chip vendors are developing a new family of processors designed from the ground up to run Java applications at optimum speed. BYTE obtained exclusive technical details about Sun's picoJava architecture, which will provide the underpinnings for some Java chips that shoul d ship next year. Ea rly tests using Java-chip simulations point to significant speed advantages over general-purpose CPUs that use interpreters or just-in-time compilers to run Java code.

Intel hasn't announced Java-specific architectural changes for its processors, but it's not standing still, either. Over the next 12 months, the company will introduce three major new chips, including the first Pentium Pro to break the 300-MHz barrier. Stretch your sights into 1998, and you begin to see Intel's seventh-generation processor, the secretive Merced joint project with Hewlett-Packard.

Intel has good reason to continue to innovate. Even if Java chips never take off, we expect to see nine new x86 chips from AMD, Cyrix, and the lesser-known IMS. At the same time, the PowerPC Alliance is redoubling its efforts to develop pace-setting chips and a hardware standard that will spawn PowerPC systems for the Mac OS, Windows NT, and Unix.

Myriad CPU choices may be confusing at first, but if you choose wisely, your next computer might give you the fastest performance ever for the applications that are important to you. In relative terms, your next processor will deliver this performance at a bargain price. If you choose badly, however, you may be shackled with a processor that's blazingly fast for some applications but a slouch for others. If that happens, no price is a bargain.

The following stories can help you find your next CPU and begin to plan for the generation after that. In the end, you may long for the days when you needed only to compare clock speeds to find the right chip.