X-bit labs

March 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 2)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

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

As for the launch timetable of IA32E processors from Intel, we should regard such chips as the Athlon 64. Until Microsoft has finished its Longhorn (that is, for the next couple of years), no processor will really need 64-bit memory addressing. At least this will be true for 99% of PC users who are not engaged into scientific calculations. In theory, the 64 bits should provide some benefits in multimedia applications, but that’s not too critical. Intel’s introduction of IA32E into the Prescott has been provoked by purely marketing considerations: they must not let AMD sleep well.

Server Xeons on the Nocona core are quite another matter. Sophisticated server applications which move around colossal data amounts do need 64-bit memory addressing – this is the field where Intel has started losing to the successful Opteron as this chip from AMD has met no worthy rival. Now that Intel has introduced an alternative, the company’s image should provide some advantage over AMD in the server market. We will see if it’s not too late for Intel to try to regain what has been lost.

This news was really hot, but we should still wait for its consequences to spring up. There’s another piece of hot news, and about a real product! The Prescott, the first 90nm x86 chip for desktop computers, brings about 13 new instructions called SSE3 for processing multimedia data.

Prescott features a double (1MB) L2 cache and 2.5 times more transistors (125 million against 55 million). I wonder what unknown-yet technologies this surplus of transistors conceals! The chip also has a very, very long pipeline, which affected the performance negatively if we take the frequency as the criterion. As a result, Prescott appears losing to the same-frequency Northwood across a number of tasks.

Intel rolled out five models in a row, with the frequency ranging from 2.8 to 3.4GHz, although the junior, 2.8GHz, model appeared in stores only in the middle of the past month, while the 3.4GHz version should have gone public this month only. By all evidence, Intel hasn’t yet solved its problems with the 90nm manufacturing technology. On the other hand, AMD doesn’t have such a process at all, while Intel is going to deal with those problems immediately. End of February, chips with the new core stepping (D0) should have started shipping. They are more economical and ready to come to the market in early May. Curiously, Intel is only speaking about new versions of 2.8-3.2GHz chips, so it seems like there is no such thing as a 3.4GHz Prescott with C0 core stepping at all, notwithstanding the announcement.

That’s the order of appearance of the new processors in the retail market: the 2.8GHz Prescott was soon followed by the 3.0GHz model. By the end of February we suddenly saw the unannounced 2.4GHz chip. Such chips seem to be defective Prescotts, which are unstable at their planned frequency. Well, Intel always has an escape way in every situation: they squeeze the Northwood core to the last drop releasing two new chips on the old core along with the announcement of the Prescott: Pentium 4 3.4GHz and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition.