Intel Dusts Itself Off, Introduces Chip : Computers: The company unveils its powerful new P6. It hopes to put the Pentium chapter behind it.

Roaring back after the Pentium chip debacle, Intel Corp. on Thursday unveiled its latest microprocessor, the P6, and signaled its intention to give no ground to its growing array of competitors.

Intel offered up technical specifications of the chip, successor to its flagship Pentium, at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, an annual gathering of the best and brightest in computer chip design.

With the debut of the P6, Intel hopes to close the chapter on the public relations disaster that resulted when the company was accused of covering up a flaw in the Pentium. Intel was forced to admit its mistake and took a $475-million charge during the last quarter to cover the cost of replacing bad Pentiums.

Now Intel is back and ready to throw its weight around. The new chip packs 5.5 billion transistors on a two-chip package only 4% larger than the original Pentium. The company broke with years of precedent and adopted a design method called reduced-instruction-set computing, or RISC.

RISC processors break up instructions into smaller pieces, delegating them to different parts of the chip, where they can be tackled concurrently and, hence, more quickly. Traditionally, a microprocessor, the engine of any personal computer, handles instructions one at a time, acting on them as if they were delivered on an assembly line.

Companies designing powerful desktop computers for scientists and engineers moved to RISC processors in the 1980s. Recently, Advanced Micro Devices and Richardson, Tex.-based Cyrix, makers of Intel-compatible chips, began adopting RISC.

Those companies now pose an even more significant challenge to Intel in the wake of legal settlements that enable them to sell Intel-like products. In adopting RISC, Intel has taken a lesson from its competitors.

Now it will do them one better by accelerating chip development. Intel began work on the P6 in 1991 at the same time it was in the middle of developing the Pentium, the first time it has designed two chips at once.

Intel is also moving aggressively to exploit its formidable manufacturing prowess: The company will step up manufacturing of the P6 more quickly than it has with previous generations of chips, bringing it into the mainstream of computing as quickly as possible.

“Our biggest issue is going to be ramping up production,” acknowledged Mike Johnson, architect of Advanced Micro Device’s competing K5 chip, which will ship in the summer. AMD is currently bringing its second chip plant on line. Intel has 10 chip-fabrication plants and is building another.

The P6 will begin shipping in the third quarter at prices expected to range from $1,000 to $1,500. At first, it will appear in only the most powerful machines--servers that orchestrate a network of PCs--and scientific and engineering workstations.

At the same time, Intel will drop Pentium prices. A high-end Pentium chip currently sells for $673. By May, the price will be $500, industry sources say. Intel predicts that the Pentium will replace its predecessor, the 486, as the most widely used processor in PCs by the end of this year.

AMD and Cyrix anticipate that PCs sporting their Pentium-compatible chips will be widely introduced in November at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas. Their debut will coincide with the volume availability of Intel’s P6.

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