X-bit labs

March 2004 Hardware News Overview

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 03/15/2004 | 02:11 AM ]

Winter is over. Let’s sum up the achievements and results of the past winter months in our regular monthly hardware coverage. You will be able to find the latest and most interesting news about processors, mainboards and chipsets, graphics chips and VGA cards, as well as monitors, notebooks and memory!

Table of contents:

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

Processors

With a slight delay Mercury Research summed up the results of the Q4 of the last year: Intel’s 82.8% (+0.2) against AMD’s 15.5% (-0.2). This is a very negligible change, in spite of the beginning of Athlon 64 shipments. Well, this was only the beginning, and the new processor will have much more weight in the current quarter results. The whole picture for the entire past year also remained the same, although with some advantage to AMD: Intel’s 82.9% (-0.7%) against AMD’s 15.4% (+0.5%). This is obviously due to AMD’s dumping at the beginning of 2003 when the Athlon XP reached its evolution peak, while Intel didn’t have the Prescott as a worthy response.

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These are deeds long past, although necessary to emphasize. Now we are more interested in the last month, rather than last year. The notorious 64-bit processor architecture was the hot topic of February. To be more precise, there was a sudden twist in the development of the plot: 64-bit addressing had been considered as absolutely impossible in Intel processors, but this attitude changed with the time. You have surely heard persistent rumors about the Yamhill project. The crowd of disbelievers got smaller too as the very idea of desktop 64-bit computing started making some sense. The Athlon 64 received a warm welcome from the market and Microsoft announced its starting mass testing of Windows XP 64-Bit Edition (of course, solely for the Athlon 64). With such things going on in the background, Intel had to listen to the mass market.

In February, they made another step in this direction having announced Intel Clackamas technology at Intel Developer Forum (IDF). The technology is not an exact copy of the AMD x84-64, but close enough to run the same Windows XP 64-Bit Edition with different dynamic-link libraries. At least, AMD and Intel have different names for the new registers.

Anyway, I hadn’t been expecting things to turn this most favorable way. That has now become a kind of tradition: Intel utterly opposes every demand of the market, but then gives up and does everything right. That’s what we saw with Rambus when Intel was grating the industry nerves for a while, but then launched the i815E and even kind of headed the standardization process for PC133 SDRAM.

The company is wasting no time now. The first quarter of 2004 is passing by, and the second is going to bring us a Xeon with the 64 bits. 64-bit chips on the Prescott core are expected to arrive by the end of this year. This is a final confirmation to the earlier rumors about the Prescott core having the CT technology originally. Once again, this is Intel’s way of doing things. By the way, now that the technology has been officially announced, we should use its official name – IA32E where “E” stands for “Extended”, of course. Frankly speaking, “x86-64” seems more winning from the marketing point of view.