A planned P7 microprocessor in the works at Intel Corp reckoned to be almost, though not entirely, a RISC affair, designed with multiprocessing in mind and still some three years, which will likely stretch to five years, out – will finally break compatibility with the company’s current iAPX-86 CPU family, sources say. However, cutting apron strings to the MS-DOS world actually begins with the P6, a superscalar, superpipelined successor to Pentium. Fabricated in CMOS and running at 133MHz, P6 will, according to sources, be offered as a board-level product pitched as a high-end building block, with spaces for up to four of the 250 MIPS parts. P6’s RISC core will form the guts of future generations, including P7. Unlike P7, P6 will include an emulator that can run (recompiled) code developed for the iAPX-86 series. Although Intel was talking last quarter about getting P6 out of the door by the end of this year, that is highly unlikely now the Pentium is late: it needs time to recoup its investment in the part, and still has plenty left to milk in the 80486. P6, we hear, is now slated for the end of 1994, and there maybe a P67 transition chip to manage the change up to P7.
