| System vendors and motherboard manufacturers will
generally welcome the arrival of Pentium-class processors
from AMD, Cyrix, and NexGen, even if some of them don't
anticipate using any chips other than Intel's. They figure
the extra competition will help drive down prices, ease
supply shortages, open up new design options, and
accelerate development. Compaq (Houston, TX), currently the number-three system vendor behind Apple and IBM, says multiple sourcing is crucial to its goal of becoming number one by 1996. That's why Compaq recently signed a deal with AMD, even though Intel will remain its primary supplier of CPUs. Compaq is also a financial backer of NexGen, although no deal to use NexGen chips in Compaq systems has been announced. "By working with Intel and AMD, which each have a different combination of price/performance in their products, we're better able to offer more choices to our customers to meet their needs," says John Sweney, Compaq's program manager for technical public relations. "For us, it's great to have relationships with both Intel and AMD." Acer America (San Jose, CA) is another system vendor that relies primarily on Intel but also buys some CPUs from AMD. (Acer buys chips from Cyrix, too, but only for bare-bones motherboards sold to other vendors.) Acer has signed nondisclosure agreements to evaluate the forthcoming AMD K5 and Cyrix M1 processors, but it is concerned about how extensively its motherboards must be redesigned to accommodate the chips. "If the chip has a pin-out that's not compatible with Intel's, then it has to offer a strong price/performance advantage to make it worth our time to redesign," says John Chang, Acer's senior director of product marketing. One solution is to design a motherboard that accepts a CPU daughtercard, allowing maximum flexibility. Properly designed, a CPU daughtercard won't impair performance, Chang says, but it adds to the cost of the motherboard. Compaq, like Acer, makes all its own motherboards but is less concerned about minor differences among competing CPUs. "It doesn't impose any particular design issues for us because we're constantly redesigning our boards anyway," says Sweney. He notes that some of Compaq's motherboards are designed specifically for Intel chips, others will be designed for AMD chips, and some for either. Micronics (Fremont, CA), a motherboard supplier that cranks out 40,000 to 50,000 boards a month, says it fine-tunes its designs to specific processors and buys Intel chips exclusively — however, that could change. "We still haven't had a compelling reason to jump ship," says Tom Benoit, corporate marketing manager at Micronics. "Would we? Yes. It would have to be something that offers better performance or more differentiation — and, of course, lower price. The PC market is a very price-sensitive market." But price isn't everything. Benoit points out that even though he could probably get a better deal on Cyrix 486 chips right now, Cyrix uses a writeback cache instead of the write-through cache on Intel's 486. That would require Micronics to modify its motherboards, so it's easier to stick with Intel. "It's not as simple as who's got the cheapest part or who's got the fastest part," he says. "And there's something to be said for maintaining a relationship." Copyright 1994-1998 BYTE |