Vendors vie to break 300-MHz chip barrier; HP, Intel, Digital unveil plans. (HP's PA-RISC 8200, 8500 processors, DEC's 600MHz Alpha processor) (Product Development)(Brief Article)

Hewlett-Packard Co. and Intel Corp. last week fleshed out plans to develop processors that blaze at speeds exceeding 300 MHz.

HP chose the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, Calif., last week to detail its PA-RISC 8000 processor line, which will gain the 220-MHz 8200 model that will show up in desktops, personal workstations, and midrange servers, such as the K-class applications server, early next year, said Paul Perez, project manager at HP. The PA-8200 promises to double performance with off-chip cache size increased to 2MB of instruction and 2MB of data, as well as with enhancements to the memory subsystem that will nearly halve access times in bus cycles to memory. …