X-bit labs

May 2004 Hardware News Overview (page 3)

Category: Editorial

by Andy Yaschenko

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

So what about those non-alternative products they make us buy? In April, the 3.2GHz Prescott left paper to be realized and offered. So we don’t see only the 3.4GHz chip among the list of products announced back on February 2. As a kind of compensation, the Japanese retail net reported availability of the 0.13-micron 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition for over one thousand bucks. Curiously, this chip consists of 178 million transistors, while graphics cards on the much more complex GeForce 6800 Ultra chip (about one third more transistors) cost twice less…

By the way, the 3.2GHz Prescott in Japan costs only $310, although it is still tight if we take the GeForce 6800 Ultra as a reference point. In June, the 3.6GHz Pentium 4 560 is expected, officially priced something like $640. There’s only one consolation – it will be accompanied by the 2.8GHz Celeron priced the reasonable sum of $117.

Now what about Intel’s own 64-bit processors? In April, there appeared new 1.4 and 1.6GHz versions of the Itanium 2 with 3MB of L3 cache. Curiously, the performance grew by a quarter over the 1.4GHz Itanium 2 with 1.5MB of L2 cache, while the manufacturing cost, according to Intel, dropped by a quarter, too. Intel’s plans about the merger of the Itanium and Xeon lines are interesting too – the company is going to have a unified platform for these processors by 2007 and the Itanium is expected to surpass the Xeon by the price/performance ratio by that time. Intel’s employees do speak about an inevitable convergence of prices for the two processors in the future.

By the way, these CPUs have got rid of one serious competitor in April. Sun stopped developing UltraSPARC V and Gemini processors to focus on some mysterious high-performing computer systems of the next generation. That’s sad and I only hope this is not an indication of a nearing downfall of the renowned player in the processor market. After all, the money Sun sued from Microsoft is enough for a serious restructuring. The company seems to have started restructuring already, and we may yet see it rebirthing like a phoenix.

Transmeta has created itself another image: of an Alice falling down a bottomless tunnel. The company ended another quarter with a usual loss of $23.4 million with sales amounting to $5.2 million. They have about $113 million on their bank account, which will last the company for a year more of such business. On the other hand, Transmeta has luckily chosen a technological partner, Fujitsu, who started shipping samples of the 90nm Efficeon, and has licensed their energy-saving technology to NEC which seems to be willing to use it in its chips. Hewlett-Packard also announced end of April that it would produce 1U servers on the basis of the Efficeon. They are gonna make it perhaps?