X-bit labs

Annual Hardware Overview: A Glance Back at the Year 2003 (page 6)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

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

Those remaining 1.6% belong to the “kids”, Transmeta and VIA. Yes, there are still two of them, although Transmeta lost about $90 million in the last four quarters with sales volumes amounting to $20 million (per year!). Well, what do they have for sale?

TM5600 is not interesting anymore now that we have Centrino. Transmeta’s response to Intel – TM8000 called Efficeon this year – didn’t reach the stores in 2003. Transmeta once again promised to make the processor available in the third quarter of 2003 and did ship… sample chips in September. They are 130nm of course, but Transmeta made arrangements with Fujitsu to produce 90nm Efficeons starting from the second quarter of 2004. Samples of 90nm chips are expected to appear in January.

VIA Technologies is doing somewhat better. Early in 2003, the company released the long-anticipated Nehemiah core as a 1GHz Socket370 C3 processor with SSE support. In spring they presented the Mark project, which is a single chip including the CLE266 North Bridge and the C3 core. A new mainboard form-factor was announced to support this chip – Nano ITX – with dimensions of 12x12cm. They also sampled the mobile C3 (Antaur). What’s most important, all of this was launched into mass production throughout the year. VIA also fosters high hopes for the 90nm production technology.

Mainboards

Once the chipset maker Number 1, VIA Technologies at last pocketed its pride and got reconciled with Intel. The quarrel started a few years ago, but is now perfectly over: all past sins are forgiven plus they agreed on cross-licensing for the future. VIA took a long time to count up its losses and understand that it’s much cheaper to pay Intel for licensing rather than suffer drooping sales volumes.

VIA managed to enroll into the next round of technological wars Intel had started with its i865/i875 in spring. I can’t deny that after Intel wound up its affair with Rambus, it again bakes up excellent chipsets. Both series were embraced by the manufacturers and ended 2003 with a status of the market leaders. Talking about the mass market, it is the i865PE, although the other models were quite confident in their respective market niches, too.

For example, the i865G with the integrated graphics core (and average performance) became the OEMs’ favorite, while the i875 was quite successful where it had been supposed to: in the workstation market and in systems for enthusiastic users. Suddenly, the i875P faced severe competition from i865PE! Mainboard manufacturers found a way to enable Performance Acceleration Technology (PAT) in i865PE although it had been advertised as the i875P’s unique and distinctive feature. The sales of the expensive i875P were under a serious threat.