The year is about its end and X-bit labs decided to offer you the top ten news-stories of the year. You read them the most and nearly all of them appeared to be guides in the next-generation of hardware and computing.

Let’s have a look at what news you read during the year.

Processors

AMD has been astonishingly successful in 2004; while Intel brought a chip that deserves respect from its feature-set, it still could not boast with the same level of performance and capabilities compared to AMD64. You all seemed to be very interested in the redesign of the Intel Pentium 4 E processor described in the news-story entitled “Intel to Redesign Pentium 4 E Processors”; you were also quite curios about the story called “Intel Redesigns Xeon, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition Processors”, our stats show. In spite of everyone’s anticipation Intel said clear a “no” to 64-bit Pentium processors in retail, as our news-story “Intel Says "No" to 64-bit Pentium 4 in Retail” claimed. And after being pointed-out heat dissipation of the Prescott processor, even Intel’s CTO admitted, that such trend is dangerous and a “Pentium PC May Need the Power of a Nuclear Reactor” in a number of years.

Despite of inevitable success, Advanced Micro Devices still had a number of issues, including pretty slow transition to Socket 939 platform, as our news-story “AMD to Stretch Transition to Socket 939” anticipated. To strengthen its success, AMD demonstrated AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 chip early in the year: you were tremendously interested to find out the information about this chip in our story entitled “AMD Displays Athlon 64 FX-53 Microprocessor”. You also expressed unbelievable interest to “AMD Samples Athlon 64 4000+, FX-55 Chips, but on 130nm” news-story. Later during the year you were interested how Microsoft planned to enable AMD’s EVP in its Service Pack 2 for the Windows XP OS in “Microsoft to Enable AMD64 Security Techniques by Windows XP SP2” story.

In spite of certain advantages the Prescott brought, you all were curious about the axe that was projected to hit the neck of the Intel Pentium 4 in the appropriate article “Intel Conroe – the Axe for Intel Pentium 4?”. Nevertheless, you paid tremendous attention to dual-core Prescott processor that was then called Smithfield: “Dual-Core Pentium 4 “Prescott” Processors on the Horizon”. But right after Mr. Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64 doubted Intel really demonstrated a dual-core chip at IDF, you all were here to read the story “Analyst Doubts Intel’s Dual-Core Demonstration”.

The year brought processors that were tremendously hot and power-hungry. A lot of you were interested in cooling those chips, thus, you paid a great deal of attention to the story “AMD Drives Integrated Peltier Cooling into Chips”.

Visual Processing Units

Even though Jon Peddie says there are loads of graphics companies around, you all seemed to be interested in only two of them: ATI Technologies Inc. and NVIDIA Corporation, the two long-time graphics and multimedia tycoons.

While NVIDIA Corp. did a terrific job in 2004: it not only tackled all the issues with the GeForce FX family, but also brought Shader Model 3.0 and some other innovations to the world, but the year has passed under the sign of its Markham, Ontario-based ATI Technologies, judging by our stats for the news.

The industry paid a marvelous amount of interest to the RADEON 9550 VPU in the news-story called “ATI Technologies Unwraps RADEON 9550”. Then, you read how ATI showcases its R420 at IDF – “ATI Technologies Showcases R420 at Intel Developer Forum” – and then how ATI boosted the performance of its RADEON X800. Little bit later you checked out how the RADEON X800 looks like in the story entitled “ATI RADEON X800 Gets its Face” and towards the year end lucky owners of the boards admired ATI’s Half-Life 2 benchmarks in “First Half-Life 2 Benchmarks Revealed”. Not really a lot of you actually wanted to know ATI’s RADEON X800 specs and the fact that its functionality excluded Shader Model 3.0.

Chipsets

NVIDIA clearly has a triumph with its nForce2, nForce3 and nForce4 chipsets, which is probably why you really liked the news-story called “NVIDIA to Return Dual-Chip Core-Logic Products”. Still, Intel and its TwinCastle also got a huge amount of attention “Intel Twin Castle – Intel’s New Approach of Chipset Making”.

Multimedia

The most-visited multimedia news of the year were Xbox 2-related stories “Microsoft’s Xbox 2 Architecture Unveiled” and “Xbox 2 Hardware Specs Sneak into Web”.