IBM unveils new chips, PCs and Internet appliances

IBM primed its customers and competitors on Monday about new chip technology that is emerging from its labs and new PCs and Internet devices that it has in the pipeline.

Big Blue plans to reveal the processor technology on Wednesday, which it claims will enable it to build chips that require only half the power and run as much as five times faster than existing chips, at speeds up to 4.5GHz.

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are also expected to announce PC chips that breach the 1GHz barrier this year.

IBM's new Interlocked Pipelined Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (IP CMOS) circuit design technology is based on conventional silicon transistors, but also includes a distributed decentralised clock which uses locally generated clocks to run smaller sections of a circuit.

This enables faster sections of the circuits to run at higher cycles without needing to wait for slower ones to catch up.

Stanley Schuster, an IBM researcher, said: "Maintaining a synchronous clock across an entire chip becomes increasingly difficult as performance rises, and the clock itself can limit performance. We believe this new design will help us overcome those problems in future generations of high speed chips."

Randall Isaac, an IBM vice president, claimed that such innovations in chip design, rather than simply making them smaller, would lead to the performance gains needed to bring about the era of gigahertz chips.

He added that Big Blue had other promising technologies in its laboratories, but refused to say when any of them would be generally available.

But IBM also plans to roll out a raft of new PCs in the spring, including the IBM Internet Appliance - an all-in-one flatpanel PC, a low cost desktop, a Linux based network station, and a thin client that will fit on the back of a flatpanel monitor.

The products come under the banner of Project Eon (Edge of the Network) and are an attempt by Big Blue to make its PC business profitable.

Maria DeGiglio, an analyst at financial services company DH Andrews, said: "This is not just hardware and software, it's the tools, support and solutions. It's a huge undertaking and IBM is the one company that can handle it."