X-bit labs

February 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 2)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

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

New products are also looming on the horizon. The new CG revision of the Athlon 64 should see the light of day sometime next quarter. Such processors should be less fastidious about the memory you use and, theoretically, should work faster with this memory in dual-channel mode, as the CG core will be the one used in future 939-pin CPUs.

I have no doubts this year is going to be financially successful for AMD exactly because the Athlon 64 has grown mature and strong. The quantity of shipped processors of this family was relatively small in Q4, but the results were anyway very pleasant: a sales volume growth of 76% over the previous year and of 26% over the previous quarter. Add a profit of $43 million, too!

Of course, one successful quarter couldn’t wipe out the losses of the three previous ones, so the company reported a total loss of $274 million in 2003. Well, this is even better than the $1.3 billion loss in 2002! As I mentioned above, AMD hopes to be profitable in this quarter, too, by increasing the share of the Athlon 64 in their production although the start of each year is traditionally an unfavorable time for all vendors.

January, Intel also summed up the results of Q4 and 2003. The numbers are incomparable and astonishing. They notched another record this quarter: $8.74 million sales (+12% over the previous quarter) and a net profit of $2.2 billion (31% higher than in Q3 and twice higher than in the Q4 of 2002). Intel raked in $5.6 billion in 2003, having sold its products for $30.1 billion. Just like AMD, the company is all enthusiastic about the next year.

The enthusiasm is well grounded. First of all, the Prescott made his official debut at last. Well, they started taking orders for this processor in Europe in middle of January already. However, there are serious doubts about the Prescott’s being able to improve Intel’s positions this year. High-speed Prescott-core processors are associated with the Socket T (the 3.6GHz Pentium 4 will support only this socket), and LGA775 processors will constitute less than 50% of all processors sold by Intel in 2004, and their share will only be 8% in the second quarter.

The frequency growth, as scheduled, is small, too. It is going to step up from the original 3.6GHz in the second quarter to 3.8GHz in Q3. It’s probable that they can drive the clock-rate to 4GHz by the end of this year, but I won’t be too sure about it. We should also keep it in mind that the Intel Pentium 4 E “Prescott” chips provide a bit worse performance than the Intel Pentium 4 “Northwood” processors of the same frequency due to the redesigned architecture; therefore, the 90nm Pentium 4 E will really get faster than the 130nm Pentium 4 when 3.6GHz and faster flavours are unveiled.

Curiously, as it turned out in January, Intel will launch a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition in the LGA775 form-factor in Q2 2004, which was initially expected to be an exclusive prerogative of the Socket 478. It’s pretty evident that this processor on a 0.13 micron Gallatin core will boast a higher performance than the new 3.4GHz Pentium 4 E on the new core because of larger cache. Moreover, it may turn out that the chip will be even faster than the Pentium 4 E processor at 3.6GHz also launching in Q2 2004, as if the Prescott 3.6GHz was speedier than the Extreme Edition at 3.4GHz, why would Intel launch a $999 chip that is slower than a $637 one?