Frustrated by Intel Corp’s refusal to put a name to its projects, Microprocessor Report publisher Michael Slater has dubbed its future chips the P7a and the P7b. P7a, which Slater said could just as easily be called P6+, is an Intel-only next-generation iAPX-86 chip. P7b is the Very Long Instruction Word-oriented architecture that Hewlett-Packard Co and Intel are developing together. Both will be 64-bit. Although the P7b has had more publicity, Slater says that the P7a will be more important for the personal computer market and will sell more chips in the short term. Chicago Corp analyst David Wu called an Electronic News item suggesting that design disagreements in the Hewlett-Packard-Intel chip development might be leading to a rift between the two firms, the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. He says a split is unlikely because Hewlett-Packard has bet the company on the architecture, as has Intel. He repeated his claims that there will be at least two versions spinning from the architecture: the two companies have agreed on an architecture, not a chip, so they can design different chips at will, he said.
