X-bit labs

April 2004 Hardware News Overview

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 04/21/2004 | 09:34 AM ]

Today we are going to offer you a detailed coverage of the events, which took place in the past month, and to see how they are going to affect the situation in the CPU, chipset, mainboard, graphics, memory and peripherals markets. If you feel like you might have missed something recently, then check out our article now!

Table of contents:

• CPU
  
• Mainboards
  
• Memory
  
• Graphics
  
• Monitors
  
• Drives
  
• Notebooks
  

CPU

The hottest news of March was surely Intel’s voiced intention to use a new rating-based system for marking their processors. The three-digit index will depend on the frequency of the chip, but also on other parameters that affect performance in some way (the FSB frequency, the cache size, support of various technologies and instructions and so on). By the latest unofficial info, the existing Pentium 4 will get a rating from 520 to 760 points where 5xx are reserved for the ordinary Pentium and 7xx for its Extreme Edition. The Celeron with its 2.53-3.33GHz frequencies will occupy a small stretch from 325 to 350.

<%BANNER[article]%>

This news and the new rating system are definitely good. At least, the proposed system is more articulate than the spontaneously-appearing suffixes behind the frequency (A, B, C…). Today we have four versions of the Pentium 4 2.8GHz (one model has no suffix at all and three others have those alphabetical markings). Theoretically, this approach could lead to a fifth version with the same frequency (EE for Extreme Edition).

As a result, Intel chose to borrow the well-known and proven labeling system from the manufacturers of cars, planes, trains, TV-sets, Opteron processors and so on. Customers from other industries don’t complain about it – there’s no inconveniency for them. The rating system will start to be implemented since the Pentium M and Intel’s mobile processors will have their own independent numbering system: 3xx for the Celeron M, 5xx for the Mobile Pentium 4, and 7xx for the Pentium M.

By the way, don’t you recall the indignation of some critics about AMD’s denouncing the megahertz and offering their new rating system some time ago? Now, Intel found itself in a situation when they could double the L2 cache in the 90nm Prescott and Dothan processors compared to 130nm Northwood and Banias but couldn’t push the clock rate up that high. They have now to explain the customer that the frequency alone is not the only thing that matters.

Intel isn’t only borrowing, it’s also loaning ideas. Thus, AMD intends to implement the SSE3 instruction set into its future processors – SSE3 has proved to be really useful for games and multimedia applications. After that, Intel will only have one ace up its sleeve – Hyper-Threading – since AMD doesn’t want to take it up. It’s too difficult to implement this technology in the 64-bit CPUs AMD is now manufacturing.