X-bit labs

February 2004 Hardware News Overview

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 02/23/2004 | 06:37 PM ]

The first month of the new year 2004 has passed. Let’s find out what we can expect in the remaining winter time and what effect will the events have on the processor, mainboard, video, storage and other markets in the nearest future. Learn more about the latest hardware news and see the future!

Table of contents:

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

Processors

Let’s take the companies in the “weight” order: Intel will be discussed last and AMD just before it. Traditional outsiders, Transmeta and VIA, come first. Transmeta summed up the results of the last quarter and found itself losing $21.6 million with a sales volume of $3.6 million. This should come as no surprise, though, as the company has been constantly losing money (a loss of $72 million in 2003). They still hope to become profitable in 2005 with their 90nm Efficeon. A couple of new processors may help, too. The company targets its Crusoe TM5700/TM5900 in an ultra-compact packaging for 1U servers, printers, points-of-sale and everything else, but never mentions notebooks! Well, no one tells you can’t use those processors there. Anyway, Transmeta is groping for a new niche to apply itself to and that’s good for the company.

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VIA Technologies feels all right as it is, but it is also waiting for the 90nm Esther core (2GHz chips) to be produced by IBM (poor TSMC! VIA left it, too) since the second half of this year, the same timetable as we have with the Efficeon. Besides the frequency, there’s scanty info about the new chip, and I don’t feel like making wild guesses. Let them release it first (if it ever be released). However, VIA has every reason to be optimistic when it promises to ship 5.5 million processors this year (against 3.6 million in 2003, although they had planned this number to be as high as 6 million).

These numbers are negligible for AMD as it sells more chips in a single quarter. This quarter they are planning to sell more than a million of Athlon 64 CPUs; with their appealing price, this plan has every chance to be a success. Meanwhile, the same low price makes dubious the realization of the other declared goal – to end the quarter with a profit. We’ll talk about the monetary predicaments of AMD shortly. Right now – processors.

In January we saw the Athlon 64 3400+ arriving on the classic ClawHammer core, with 1MB of L2 cache and a frequency of 2.2GHz. While the official volume price is $417, first exclusive samples emerged in super-expensive Japan at $437 only. By the way, the official price of the previous flagman, the Athlon 64 3200+, changed considerably. AMD dropped it from $417 to $278. The other 3200+ processor (Athlon XP) went down in price, too, from $325 to $213.

The Athlon 64 3400+ showed up in two slightly different incarnations: for desktop systems and as the Desktop Replacement (DTR), that is, for big and hungry notebooks. That makes the new processor series from AMD the more valuable: Mobile Athlon 64 2800, 3000+ and 3200+ are positioned as truly mobile CPUs. Their price is just a little higher than that of their desktop counterparts; well, the same applies for their power-saving capabilities.