Tomorrow Is Here

Easier said than done, since it hinges on how many transistors can be packed into a chip, that is, how small can you make a transistor. But the demand for faster computing has been relentlessly pushing transistor sizes down: the numbers have increased from less than five million transistors on a chip in 1986 to 120 million this year. But this success has come at a price: chip production cost from drawing board to marketing stage has spiralled from around $500 million five years ago to over $4 billion this year—a cost few companies in the world can afford.

Scientists hope to cram nearly 10 million transistors in a real-estate of one square inch of the Merced, named after a river in the US. The USP of the chip will be that it will be compatible with Unix and Windows, the two most popular operating systems: software that runs the basic functions of a computer. What's more, the chip will act like a bunch of processors working together—and thus solve problems faster unlike present-day processor chips.

HP and Intel hope Merced will catapult processor chip technology into a new era. Ever since Intel invented the processor in the '70s Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) architecture was the fad if 100 functions were to be performed by the chip, one key was assigned to each. The '80s saw Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) technology, which allowed far lesser number of keys and a combination of the keys for an instruction. Says Vikram Mehta, Hong Kong-based director marketing, enterprise account organisation, HP: "The new chip will be 10 times faster than any RISC-based system, and will deliver 10 times the performance at less than half the cost."

The brains behind Merced John Crawford of Intel and Jerry Huck of HP—would certainly be aware of the challenge posed by Cyrix and Advance Micro Devices (AMD) to Intel's processor market, which is still robust and healthy, boasting over 80 per cent share of the market. However, a chip with the promise of Merced should take some time for Cyrix and AMD (despite having in their ranks, Vinod Dham, the man behind Intel's Pentium range) to churn out.

Clearly, if Merced delivers the promise, profits are sure to come, maybe faster than the processor itself.