Micro 22 times as powerful as PC

Press, 2 September 1986, Page 32

Micro 22 times as powerful as PC

Reprinted from the “Economist,” London

A new generation of desktop computers is about to hit the market. Based on Intel’s 80386 microprocessor, they will have about 22 times the processing power of today’s IBM PC. That is enough to run a small office, create complicated engineering graphics, or crank through the tortuous reasoning of artificial intelligence. It is more power than computer makers know what to do with.

Nearly every company that now makes an IBMcompatible desktop computer seems to be developing a new machine using the 80386 chip. Many industry watchers think that Compaq will be first to market, this month. IBM, as usual, will probably take its own sweet time in getting to market — leaving competitors waiting nervously to see what new, proprietary twists Big Blue puts into the technology. But the main problem facing companies building 80386 machines is to find uses for all the power there will be in their SNZ2O,OOO packages.

The new chip should be able to run all the programs written for computers using Intel’s 8086 or 80286 microprocessors, which include the IBM PC and compatible machines — but it will do so much faster. It can work through 4M instructions* a second, roughly as many as Digital Equipment’s VAX 8600 minicomputer. The 80386 can use much more memory than today’s PCs. These work with one megabyte of memory in chunks of up to 64 kilobytes; the new chip will work with up to 4000 megabytes.

Although a handful of number-crunching applications might require the chip’s full attention, most of its power would simply be wasted on an office worker tapping away at his word-processor or analysing accounts on his spreadsheet. One obvious way to use the power of computers built around the new chip is to share it out among several programs or several users. But that requires an operating system that can keep track of the various programs the machine is working on at any given time, and their data. “Windows,” the latest enhancement offered by Microsoft to the DOS operating system standard for IBM-compatible computers, allows very limited “multi-tasking.” But DOS can use only 640 kilobytes of memory; the

new chip deserves a new operating system.

There are two candidates for the job. Various companies are converting AT and T’s Unix operating system to run on the 80386. But the clever money is on Microsoft, which promises to unveil early in 1987 a beefed-up, multi-tasking version of DOS that should still allow users to run all of today’s popular programs. Although Unix promises to be more powerful — particularly in dealing with multiple users of the same machines — less software has been written for it.

A multi-tasking 80386 machine can be the focus of a network of personal computers, acting as administrators or data librarian for the less powerful colleagues. The market for such "work-group” computers is forecast to be one of the fastest-growing areas in business computing. But companies have also spotted two other fastgrowing markets which require the new chip’s power: graphics and artificial intelligence.

Graphics programs, like those used in computeraided design, are hungry

for processing power and memory to draw and manipulate the lines they put on the screen. Although much of this drawing work will in future be done by special graphics chips, engineers are loading other jobs on to graphics workstations — like calculating whether or not new products will stand up to the engineering stresses placed upon them.

Competition in the graphics work-station market is fierce. The young companies that now dominate the market, such as Sun and Apollo, have just announced lowcost SUSIS,OOO versions of their products. And Apple is also working on a highpowered version of its Macintosh computer (to be powered by Motorola’s 68020 chip) which will compete for engineering workstation sales. There is less entrenched competition in artificial-intelligence workstations. Boston’s Symbolics sells computers tailored to run Lisp, America’s leading arti-ficial-intelligence language, and Xerox offers a low-cost version. But there is no standard — either for Lisp or for the machines designed to run

it And few companies use the Lisp machines. A recent survey by Schubert Associates, of Boston, found that only one in 40 companies experimenting with artificial intelligence plans to deliver its programs to customers on a Lisp machine.

Gold Hill, an American company which sells Lisp for microcomputers, has developed an 80386 board costing SUS7OOO which can be plugged into conventional PCs. It hopes to spur the development of artificial-intelligence programs using its software. But, however popular the new chip might prove to be among software developers,, they make up a small market. And there are too few artificial intelligence programs in use to create much demand for the powerful hardware they run on. Until such power-hungry programs do become popular, 80386 computers will remain ahead of their market, if not of their time. — Copyright.