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Memorandum01

From:   Rod Welch April 19, 1991
To:     File

Subject:   SDS Marketing; Product Recognition
Review Byte Magazine article re personal computer applications


This is a review of an April, 1991, Byte Magazine article beginning on page 131. I began the review April 18, 1991, per SDS 115602, 00101.

A Talk with Intel

Designers of Intel's 386, i486, and future microprocessors talk about what lies ahead in CPU design, and the implications for personal computers.

Three (3) people participate: 


   John Crawford:  Chief architect for the 386, i486 and upcoming
                   i586 microprocessors

   Dave Vineer:    Led the design team for Intel's 386SL microprocessor

   Bill Rash:      Intel's director of the Platform Architecture Center

Crawford expects the past trend of processor performance doubling every 18 months will continue to the end of the decade.

Rash cites a pending Intel processor called the "Micro 2000" that will have significantly improved performance and integration of functions, including speech recognition and "full-motion video."

There is a separate article explaining Micro 2000 as a chip of the 21st cen- tury. It will be 10 times faster and have almost 100 times as many transistors and incorporate more functions than the most powerful processors now available.

Intel expects to produce a "single-chip PC in 1993. This will have on a single chip the functions that were on an IBM AT Model 339 motherboard.

Rash expects that further software development of OS/2 will result in applying multiprocessors.


Speech to Text

Rash cites Intel demo at Comdex of this capability; it would transcribe continuous speech -- you didn't have to pause between the words. Demo had a vocabulary of 1000 words. An i486 was doing the conversion. It is not perfect -- it won't take any accent and convert it -- but it shows that the software really made a jump forward into what I view as a very critical human interface technology, the computer getting to the point where first it can translate the text.

Rash again on page 138 indicates an objective to "...just talk to the silly thing to take notes and things like that."


New Laptops

Vineer expects that within 6 months a whole new crop of laptop computers will be available that apply advanced power management features of the 386SL chip. He expects to see smaller, lighter machines with smaller batteries to take advantage of the fact the chip uses less power.



Application Objective

Vineer says holding up a notepad:

This is my laptop, today. I'm looking for something that replaces this. This is it. This is what I want. When I can do everything that I can do with this pad of paper and this pen, I might be happy. That means being able to tear things out and hand them to my secretary. It means being able to draw pictures, it means being able to put in text, it means being able to keep my calendar, and everything else. This is my calendar. So, this is how I live, and this is what I'm looking to replace. If you can imagine this is a laptop, this in electronics, that's how I can account for 15 million transistors. Now what do I do past that? I guess I can start talking to it.

Rash:

People are going to really think through some of these scenarios of what people do, and what kinds of technologies have to be integrated into a PC to really make everybody more productive and [do] less drudgery work on their computers. And I think there's a lot to be done in the world of software.