Intel Will Unveil Speedy Chip That Does 2 Jobs at Once

Intel Corp. today will unveil a super-fast microprocessor that marks a breakthrough in chip design by carrying out two tasks at once and up to 66 million instructions per second.

The 32-bit i960CA chip, smaller than a dime but more than twice as fast as the i486 chip Intel introduced last spring, packs 600,000 transistors and is the first commercial chip to employ “super-scalar” technology.

Super-scalar design allows a chip to execute more than one instruction for each tick of its internal clock.

Instead of cramming more transistors onto the chips to get them to work faster during each cycle--the i486, for example, has 1.2 million transistors--Intel appears to have solved the elusive problem of how to get the chip to carry out two instructions per cycle.

“Imagine a car wash that can run two lanes through at a time instead of one,” said Michael Slater, editor of Microprocessor Report, an industry newsletter in Palo Alto. “The car wash with two lanes can obviously get more cars through in the same time.”

Intel’s speed rating for the i960CA chip is derived from taking the chip’s clock speed--33 million cycles per second--and doubling it.

Many other chip makers are working on super-scalar designs, said Slater, who expects to see several of those products next year and many more in 1991.