X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 01/08/2004 | 11:51 PM ]

Well, today we are going to take a glance back at the past year 2003 and sum up all the events and innovations of the hardware industry. Intriguing stories, exciting announcements, new partnerships and the most remarkable product launches of the past year in our Annual Hardware Overview!

Table of contents:

• CPU
  
• Mainboards
  
• Memory
  
• Graphics
  
• Optical and Hard Disk Drives
  

CPU

This time it was Intel who won the annual race. It owes this victory mostly to the newcomer – the Centrino platform. The Pentium M was the only processor made from scratch in the last year and it proved excellent both in performance and power consumption. The combination of the two is absolutely winning.

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But let’s be unbiased, though. Intel had enough of mobile processor series in 2003 (Pentium 4-M, Mobile Pentium 4, Mobile Celeron), among which the Pentium-M could easily and completely get lost. So the Centrino platform owes its glory particularly to the Wi-Fi unit and those $300 million spent on promotion of the “notebook with an integrated wireless network” concept.

A couple thousand hot-spots around the globe by the end of the year is a drop in the ocean, but the concept appealed to the customer (with a little help from with the massive advertising campaign), and the rate at which those hot-spots are popping up everywhere is increasing. Don’t also forget the fact that the well-designed processor architecture allowed to reduce dramatically the power consumption/heat dissipation parameters, which immediately resulted in the smaller dimensions and longer battery life of notebooks. So we’ve got a unanimous customers’ award, considering the sales volumes. Meanwhile, AMD has nothing to pit against the Centrino right now, and is unlikely to have anything in near future.

As soon as Pentium-M moves to 90nm production technology, its parameters will get even better, although this very 90nm technology was the main failure of the last year for both Intel and AMD. Intel is closer to solving this secret: the Dothan (90nm Pentium-M) will surely come out in the first quarter (although had been expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of 2003!), but the Prescott may be delayed until the second quarter as it is rumored to have problems with both the technology process and the 800MHz QPB when working with i865/875 chipsets.

AMD is down and out as to far as the manufacturing technology is concerned. Originally the company scheduled 90nm processors for the fourth quarter of 2003, but now they are not promising good news until the middle of 2004. I think Intel will surely have launched its Prescott by that time. Until then, AMD can only rely on the superiority of the Athlon 64 architecture over the Pentium 4 in their 130nm and 90nm implementations, respectively.

Well, there is nothing wrong about the Athlon 64 itself – it is a cute processor, although the half-a-year delay (capping the previous procrastinations) couldn’t have earned it a good repute. Such a delay sometimes proves fatal (as is often the case in the graphics processors world). Anyway, the bunch of technologies sealed into the Athlon 64 turned to be impressive enough for Intel to consider it the most feared competitor to the yet-unreleased Prescott rather than to currently available Pentium 4 models on the Northwood core.