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SCMP Reporter

INTEL'S monopoly in the supply of microprocessors to personal computer (PC) manufacturers is about to be dented with Silicon Graphics Inc's (SGI) intention to be an alternative source.

  In this coup, SGI is also getting a little help from Intel's long-time friend in the PC business, Microsoft.

  SGI is starting this effort by hitting out against Pentium, Intel's fifth generation x86 chips that have just been introduced on to the market.

  SGI's president of its World Trade Corp, Mr Robert Bishop, who was in Hongkong last week, said the company would be offering PC manufacturers its RISC-based (reduced-instruction-set computing) MIPS (million instructions per second) chips, factory-loaded with Microsoft Windows NT, as an alternative to Pentium.

  SGI had six fabricators producing these chips so that PC manufacturers could get the chips from multiple sources, unlike Intel, which had a monopoly on its chips supply, he said.

  Mr Bishop said the MIPS chips had been benchmark-tested and were found to be running ''at least twice [the speed of] Pentium''.

  SGI will price its chips at the same level as Pentium.

  Although the MIPS chip architecture supports Windows NT - which means that the entire range of MIPS chip could be loaded with NT - it is the lower-end R4000 chips that are most suitable for NT in the PC market for the commercial world.

  Taiwanese PC giant Acer had bought the idea and would be going to SGI for its MIPS-with-NT chips as an alternative, he said.

  ''We are in deep discussion with 20 to 30 other PC assemblers who are considering deploying from Intel to MIPS,'' said Mr Bishop.

  ''The PC industry is collapsing. There is no profit. The reason is because all the profits have gone to Intel and Microsoft.''   Intel has the monopoly on chips; Microsoft has the monopoly on the operating system.

  ''The single source monopoly has created many enemies. The PC world is in revolt and it needs to find an alternative,'' said Mr Bishop.

   ''We are suggesting that the MIPS chips can fit into the PC world, be competitively priced, available from multi-source and with NT,'' he said.

  Mr Bishop said the deal for Microsoft to co-operate with SGI was made even before SGI acquired MIPS, which was nearly two years ago.

  He said from a technical perspective, NT was originally designed for Intel's i860 RISC chip but that chip had failed in the computer industry.

  ''Microsoft has discovered that the performance of NT on Pentium is not so good and they need a RISC chip to show off NT's performance or otherwise its customers will not be happy,'' he said.

      Since then, NT had been announced on Digital's Alpha chip but the porting of Alpha was done entirely by Digital, he said.

  ''I also think that the price of Alpha is very high because the manufacturing process is different and designed only for Alpha for Digital's own factories.''   The MIPS chip is designed to be manufactured in any factory designed to fabricate DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) products.

  SGI is able to have six fabricators to produce its MIPS chips - NEC, Toshiba, LSI Logic, Siemens, IDT, and Performance Technology.

  The MIPS chip also has one million gates, compared with three million gates in Pentium.

   ''This means that Pentium is three times bigger, and three times more complicated to make.

  ''A three-million-gate chip creates heat dissipation,'' he said, claiming that PC manufacturers did not need to redesign their systems to fit in a MIPS chip.



SGI takes on Intel over PC monopoly