X-bit labs

May 2004 Hardware News Overview

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

[ 05/11/2004 | 11:21 AM ]

In our new article devoted to the news of the hardware industry you will be able to read about the new product announcements, the leading manufacturers’ plans for the near future, the exciting new stuff coming out at Computex 2004 and much more!

Table of contents:

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

Processors

AMD has been enjoying a superb vernal season – all three months of it. Well, that’s normal: when Intel is trudging from one tech process to another, AMD is flourishing and looks winning against the competitor. After Intel has polished its process off, the companies exchange their roles. This is an old and natural cycle, like the sequence of yearly seasons.

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Today we have an AMD season on the calendar, even despite the fact that the company launched no new processors in March, but just offered new revisions of old samples: a 2.4GHz Athlon 64 3400+ with 512KB of L2 cache, a 1.8GHz Athlon 64 2800+ with 512KB of L2 cache and 2.0GHz Athlon 64 3200+ with 1MB of L2 cache. Yes, AMD now has the opportunity of releasing models with a reduced cache size, leaving itself headroom for the future. What if we enlarge the L2 cache to 1MB in the 2.4GHz Athlon 64 3400+? Right, AMD will get an Athlon 64 3600+ into its assortment. And after this model they should master the 90nm process at last.

So far AMD has been busy preparing for the inevitable and imminent transition of the Athlon 64 to Socket 939, scheduled for May 25 when 3500+ and 3800+ models are to be announced. In the first case, the one hundred points above the 3400+ is only due to the integrated memory controller – it is dual-channel now rather than single-channel.

There will of course be a 3700+ model (minus the same hundred points due to the single-channel controller) for Socket 754, but this platform is steadily sinking into the low-end sector. There are rumors again about the upcoming realization of the Paris core: the Athlon 64 with 256KB of L2 cache and the 64-bit addressing capability locked will come under the old brand, as an Athlon XP. It will be compatible with mainboards on new chipsets, though, - unification rules!

AMD is also pushing forward its most successful product, the Opteron. Particularly, the economical 35W model looks very appealing: Angstrom Microsystems has already unveiled four-way 1U servers, HP and Sun intending to offer 1U products on such chips soon.

Opterons with the x50 index are expected soon, solely due to higher clock rates (up to 2.4GHz), but AMD’s more ambitious plans are waiting for the next year: dual-core Opterons in the same Socket 940 package. So, 90nm is enough to pack two chips connected via a HyperTransport bus into the same volume? Or do they mean 65nm?

Anyway, the Opteron is such a success (also because Intel doesn’t offer a worthy alternative) that even the unbreakable fortress of Dell succumbed and expressed a desire to produce servers on this processor. Well, AMD was inside before that – it turned out in April that Dell had been secretly shipping Athlon-based computers to its preferred clients.