X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003 (page 10)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

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

SiS may jump into the fight, although it looked less brilliant in 2003 in the market for both: Athlon XP and Athlon 64. SiS741 (a thorough revision of the good old SiS740) passed by without anyone noticing it, while SiS755 for Athlon 64 was delayed and unassuming. The first mainboard to use it appeared in October, and you could count up all mainboards on this chipset with the fingers of one hand. On the other hand, SiS announced SiS755FX (with Socket939 support), and scheduled SiS756 for the coming spring (PCI Express support). I think the new year will bring some improvement in SiS’ relationship with AMD.

Well, I suppose some facts discussed above can be better illustrated with a diagram:

The graph emphasizes such events as VIA’s shutting up its production of its own mainboards for the Pentium 4 in May when the SiS’ sales exceeded VIA’s. There is a noticeable improvement in the financial showings of VIA after it began selling “legitimate” products. The disturbing slump by the end of the year is caused by delays with PT880 and the active competition from NVIDIA in the Athlon 64 and XP chipset market.

I’d like to end up this section of the article nominating the Technology of the Year Award. The choice is limited and thus is simple: Performance Acceleration Technology from Intel as it provoked much sensation (and nothing more). The technology of the year, which is to “fire” in the next one, is the new case form-factor, BTX. There have been too many changes in the computer world for old ATX to adapt itself to them.

Memory

The year 2003 was absolutely black for memory makers. The SARS epidemics and the Iraq war were accompanied with a catastrophically low demand. They hoped for the dual-channel chipsets, for the end of SARS, for the back-to-school season, but they never saw any melioration in the market, only a total and hopeless downfall.

Some glimpse of hope shone through the clouds in June, when the SARS epidemic was over and the new mainboards hit the stores, with the sweet September looming ahead. It transpired, however, that the demand never reacted to all of this, and the prices went down again. The price of a 256Mbit DDR SDRAM chip fell from $6 to $4 during 2003. And that’s even not as dramatic as the things we used to see in the past.

The prices for different specifications of DDR SDRAM memory were quite curious to watch: PC3200 didn’t enjoy any significant demand in 2003, unlike PC2100 and PC2700. As a result, its price stopped at $4-5 for a 256Mbit chip and remained there thereafter. Junior specifications were more demanded, so their prices grew up until they hit the ceiling of PC3200 and stopped at that: of course junior memory types couldn’t cost more than PC3200! So we watched the three lines converged into one oscillating languidly throughout the year.