X-bit labs

April 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 6)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

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

Infineon grew from 12.7% to 16.3% in 2003 and followed Micron closely, but may not overcome it in this year: the company seems to have problems with the new 011-micron tech process and is going to start mass production of such chips only in the end of 2004 – beginning of 2005. Lately, the company also reduced its memory chip shipments by 50%… Overall, Infineon will probably be on the losing side by the year results, notwithstanding its activities in the mainland China.

Thus, the unbreakable Hynix has a chance of moving up to the second or third position by the end of the year – it doesn’t have to do much with its existing 14.7%. They just need to implement the 0.10-micron tech process on their production facilities (it’s ready and being introduced) and keep on the invasion to China where the company is negotiating about building their own fab.

It would also be interesting to watch the fate of the DDR550 initiative proposed by Hynix. They decided to position such chips as a cheap alternative to DDR2 and this sounds quite reasonable.

You may recall that Hynix was the hottest proponent of PC133 against RDRAM once. So if rumors about AMD’s going to overclock the memory controller of the Athlon 64 to support these 500-550MHz are right, the perspectives of DDR2 in this year will look even paler than now.

Hynix is the originator, but it’s clear that nearly each big memory maker can produce 550MHz DDR SDRAM chips in mass quantities as the numerous announcements of appropriate modules at CeBIT suggest. On the other hand, the same manufacturers also showed DDR2 products, PC-3200 and PC2-4300, just in case. But why should you buy them for crazy money if you can get cheaper PC4200-4400 modules that work right now, with the current i865PE, for example?

Graphics

Like with mainboards, CeBIT brought much news here. Well, the manufacturers are mostly the same. Of course, the expo might have been simply outstanding if NVIDIA and/or ATI presented their new generations of graphics chips there. The arrival of the NV40 and the R420 was in the air in Hanover. There was hardly any new info, the industry fed largely on rumors.

In a nutshell, we were promised something monstrous called GeForce FX 6xxx (6800) consisting of a couple of hundred of million of transistors (that’s more than in a Prescott or in an Athlon 64), very hot (two 12V power connectors onboard), with up to 256MB of GDDR3 in the standard version, with an architecture equivalent to 16 standard pixel pipelines and with an undefined performance. The official announcement of the chip was scheduled to April 13, but it would be “on paper” – we’ll have to wait for a couple of months to see real graphics cards on the new chip.

Overall, it looks like NVIDIA went for a big risk trying to regain its technological leadership in the PC graphics market. The new architecture looks daringly fresh, and the chip – too clumsy and hard to manufacture. I do hope, though, the new chip won’t have the unlucky fate of the NV30 (GeForce FX 5800) – NVIDIA will live through another mistake, but with heavy losses.