X-bit labs

December 2003 Hardware News Overview

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 12/19/2003 | 05:36 PM ]

We decided to resume the good tradition of writing monthly industry news overview. As you may have noticed we’ve been doing that for the memory market on a regular basis lately. Today, please find the most detailed coverage of the industry innovations for the CPU, mainboard, storage, monitor, memory, graphics and notebook fields.

Table of contents:

• Processors
  
• Mainboards
  
• Memory
  
• Graphics
  
• Monitors
  
• Hard Disk Drives and Optical Drives
  
• Notebooks
  

Processors

In spite of the problems with the 90nm manufacturing technology, Intel met the Christmas sales season with waving banners, having announced the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. The timing was perfectly chosen. First processors of the new series had reached the shelves by the end of November to be widely available in December. I can only find one fault about the new processor: it is not very new from the technological point of view being just a slightly cut down Xeon on the Gallatin core.

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Well, I just feel like fault-finding, but the result is all-important: the new 3.2GHz CPU with 2MB of L3 cache (added above the Pentium 4’s standard 512KB of L2-cache) is the most powerful Intel’s creation in the processors-for-mere-mortals class so far. It is arguable whether the 2MB of SRAM cost a few hundred bucks (the volume price is $925), but it is a fact anyway that some major PC manufacturers have already reacted to the new processor with announcements of game stations (I can’t call it a computer!) based around it. Just in time for Santa to have made his shopping before the holidays.

For those who already have a computer, the new Intel product should appear advantageous over the last AMD’s creation: you are not supposed to change your i865/875-based mainboard, memory and so on. The lifecycle of the new processor is expected to be long. It will probably be at the same performance level with first Prescott models, thus remaining a top model for at least half a year. Not topmost, as the 3.4GHz version of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (on the same core) is likely to come out somewhere in early 2004.

If the Pentium 4 XE 3.4GHz does come out instead of the Prescott 3.4GHz, this will imply severe problems with the Prescott project at large. The nature of problems remains secret: leakage currents, heat dissipation or, according to some fresh guess-work, incorrect operation with the 800MHz FSB of the i865/875 chipsets. By the way, if the latter supposition is true, we are very likely to see the Prescott in the Socket T variant only, while the Socket 478 niche will be left for the P4 XE to till up.

The Celeron project seems to be free from any problems, so Prescott-core Celeron 2.8 and 3.06GHz CPUs (a curious coincidence – they work with the 533MHz FSB) will surely show up in the second quarter of the next year. So far, the topmost representative of the family is the Celeron 2.8GHz (Northwood core, FSB400) that appeared in November. The volume price is quite traditional for a value product – $117.

The mobile Celeron series also rejuvenated in November with the arrival of the Mobile Celeron 2.5GHz with a maximum power consumption of about 35W. It’d be interesting to compare this parameter with those of the upcoming desktop Celeron on the 90-nm Prescott core. On the other hand, the 2.5GHz model is likely to be the last from its generation, which is to be substituted by a new family of mobile Celerons on the Banias core with frequencies starting at 1.2GHz.