X-bit labs

March 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 3)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

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

These are going to take the blow until April-May. Moreover, unlike its Prescott counterpart, Pentium 4 3.4GHz on Northwood core appeared in shops in the beginning of February and for the same money: $417. Intel is playing unfair: the cache is twice as small, why is the price so high then? Well, they just set the same prices for all Prescott and Northwood chips of the same frequencies and even had to drop the prices of 2.8-3.2GHz Northwood processors: Prescott production costs very little. For example, the official price for the 3.2GHz Northwood was $417 at the time of the announcement, but then plummeted to $278. I hope that while you can’t buy a 3.2GHz Pentium on the Prescott core yet, the lower price of the 3.2GHz Northwood should say its word.

The server market lives on without any turmoil (again, this calm provokes some suspicions about the 90nm production technology) with a bright future ahead. By the way, “bright” should be taken literally as Intel announced the first optical chip where data flows between transistors along miniature optical fiber instead of copper wiring.

This bright future is still in the distance, though. As far as short-term plans are concerned, they talked about reasonable and predictable things at the last IDF: the new Xeon MP processor comes on the Gallatin core and the Xeon DP on the Nocona (the economical version of the chip will also be based on this core). These chips will be followed by the next generation at the end of this year (on Potomac and Jayhawk cores, respectively, with frequencies around 4GHz). This will surely come true, if Intel polishes off its 90nm process and the Tejas core. I repeat it all once again only because I would like to stress the serious nature of the topic.

Itanium, with all the fuss about IA32E, is not yet abandoned altogether, but rather otherwise: we are waiting for the Madison with 9MB of the L3 cache this year as well as for the economical Fanwood. In the next year, for the first time in Intel’s history, the processor will propagate through fission to give birth to the dual-core Itanium on the Montecito core with an up to 24MB L3 cache and its “light” version, the Millington. In other words, the latest events in the IA32 field haven’t had any dramatic impact on the company’s plans for IA64.

AMD’s preparing its response: implementation of DDR2 support into the Athlon 64/Opteron by the end of the year in 90nm San Diego, Winchester and Toledo cores (again, those high hopes about the 90nm process!). As for the current day, and the rival for Intel’s Prescott, the company’s updating the stepping, just like Intel. Whereas Intel updates it in new chips, AMD goes the more traditional way.