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Microprocessor
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| Microprocessor
Headline News Collected By Robert R. Collins |
Week of September 2, 2001 |
Older News |
| September 4, 2001 | |
Intel and AMD declare an I/O truceBy Jack Robertson August 31, 2001 |
Archrivals Intel Corp. and AMD Corp. have reached détente on
their separate high-speed I/O standards, and officials of both
firms told EBN they are hoping to make Intel's 3GIO and AMD's
HyperTransport work together. AMD has been accepted by Intel to provide inputs for the final 3GIO spec and this month was admitted as the first "key contributor" in the 3GIO alliance, both firms said. AMD won't be admitted to the cozy 3GIO working group of Intel, IBM, Compaq, Dell and Microsoft that is drafting the preliminary I/O successor spec to PCI-X. But AMD's status gives it more influence than its membership in the PCI SIG that will finally vote on the final 3G IO status that emerges, said Chris Neuts, AMD manager of technology evangelism. |
Intel details next-generation I/O specBy Jerry Ascierto August 31, 2001 |
Intel Corp. provided a first look at technical details for
Arapahoe, the third-generation system I/O expected to replace
the ubiquitous PCI bus in a broad range of computer and
communications systems, at the Intel Developer Forum this
week. The chip interconnect is slated to hit the street in
late 2003 at speeds of 2.5 Gbits/second per channel, bringing
support for switching, packet prioritization and scalable
bandwidth. In tandem with the first look at Arapahoe, engineers have disclosed additional technical details about the PCI-X road map that will lead up to the third-generation I/O spec. |
Secretive DRAM group seeks standard status for its specBy Anthony Cataldo August 29, 2001 |
A secretive group made up of the world's biggest memory makers
and Intel Corp. has started circulating to PC makers
specifications for a double-data-rate-like DRAM that the
group's members hope will succeed Rambus and DDR-2 memories.
To generate support for the newly-minted DRAM technology, the
Advanced DRAM Technology group will propose the spec to the
Jedec standards body by year's end, said one member of the ADT
team. The ADT spec has not been publicly disclosed, but is known to be similar to DDR-2, which uses a lower driving voltage than DDR-1 and uses new signaling technology to provide higher bandwidth. The ADT group is also proposing a more traditional wide bus interface, unlike the narrow, packet-based bus used by Rambus. The group's goal is to drive the ADT DRAM technology into mainstream PCs starting in 2003 or 2004, said Farhad Tabrizi, vice president of worldwide marketing for Hynix Semiconductor and an ADT group member. |
Pentium 4 to reach notebooks next yearBy Michael Kanellos August 29, 2001 |
Intel will bring the Pentium 4 to the notebook market in the
first half of next year and then follow a year later with
Banias, a new portable chip the company says will greatly
increase battery life. More speed and less power are the themes dominating Intel's chip strategy in portables. The Pentium 4 will run at more than 1.5GHz when it emerges next year and hit 2GHz by the end of 2002, Frank Spindler, vice president of Intel's mobile products division, said during a keynote address Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum. |
AMD plays name game in megahertz raceBy John G. Spooner August 30, 2001 |
Hoping to counter a perception that its processors are slower
than those from rival Intel, Advanced Micro Devices is moving
away from branding its chips based on megahertz. Starting next month, the chipmaker will introduce a new Athlon naming plan that reflects the processor's overall performance rather than simply its speed based on megahertz. The aim is to convince PC buyers not to base their purchasing decisions on clock speed alone, but to also consider the actual performance of the chip, sources say. |
Intel sticks to Brookdale launch in first quarterBy Jack Robertson August 28, 2001 |
Intel Corp. Tuesday acknowledged that it will indeed be
shipping its Brookdale 845 DDR chipsets to OEMs and
motherboard makers in the fourth quarter, as growing industry
reports indicate, but only to allow them to qualify the
double-data-rate version for a gala launch in the first
quarter of 2002 as Intel has long maintained. Intel has already qualified a wide number of different vendor DDR memory modules and its own 845 DDR chipset, Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of Intel desktop products group, told EBN Tuesday. But he said systems firms need several months to qualify the Intel 845 DDR and memory modules in their own products. |
Taiwan's Aopen issues apology to Intel for pre-announcing BrookdaleAugust 31, 2001 |
Taiwan's AOpen Inc. must be in hot water. The Taipei-based PC
motherboard company here Friday issued an apology to Intel
Corp. for putting out a news release that pre-announced the
details and launch date of Intel's 845 chip set, code-named
Brookdale. AOpen is now asking the news media to remove a news release dated Aug. 27 from "any print, electronic, or other form'' that pre-announced the the details of Brookdale. That chip set supports SDRAM memory for PCs based on Intel's Pentium 4 processor line. |
Intel outfits Itanium processor for faster runsBy Anthony Cataldo August 31, 2001 |
Intel Corp.'s next-generation Itanium processor, code-named
McKinley, has undergone such a performance-enhancing makeover
that it has a shot at running at least 50 percent faster than
the current Itanium line, the company said. With a revamped cache structure, which includes a ground-breaking Level 3 cache, faster front-side bus and more logic resources at its disposal, McKinley is expected to hit that performance level using the same code as Itanium, the company said here at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF). |
Intel's chip-set integration will soon gobble up USB 2.0 functionBy Mark LaPedus August 29, 2001 |
Intel Corp. is at it again. The world's largest chip maker
today outlined plans to integrate more functions on PC chip
sets, ostensibly to drive down the costs of personal computer
platforms. During presentations at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) here today, the general manager of Intel's Desktop Products Group said the company plans to integrate the Universal Serial Bus (USB) 2.0 technology into its PC chip set lines by the fourth quarter of 2001. The move poses a threat for suppliers of standalone USB chips, including Cypress, NEC, and others others, noted analysts. |
| Truths...from the rumor mill | |
Intel bounty hunters after ViaBy Mike Magee August 31, 2001 |
YOU KNOW IT, I KNOW IT and we think Intel knows it too - but
there are already P4X266 boards from Via out and about in
plain white packages and passed surreptitiously by the naughty
mobo manufacturers to distributors under terms of the
strictest secrecy. Now we hear through the grapevine that Intel is desperate to get its hands on one of these items and is prepared to pay through the nose for a working Via P4 chipset. |
Mystery chipset maker set to launch Rambus, Pentium 4 partBy Tony Smith August 31, 2001 |
An unnamed chipset company has, as near as damn it, licensed
Rambus' RDRAM technology in order to offer an alternative to
Intel's i850 chipset, which it hopes to announce in less than
two weeks' time. So claim industry sources, according to a report on CNET, which wonders if the deal - which said sources suggest is pretty a much a done thing, requiring only a few finishing touches - might not be a significant boost for the memory technology developer. |
Aopen finds itself in midst of i845 PR disasterBy Mike Magee August 31, 2001 |
A VERY GOOD MORNING TO LOUIS BURNS, who turns to the INQUIRER
first every day.* Now, Louis, Aopen has said it made a big mistake by saying its Pentium 4 motherboard based on the i845 chipset had shipped. It isn't really ready, and the AX4BS and MX4BS will instead be released on the 10th of September and not a moment sooner. The press release escaped into the wild because of an internal oversight, said Tony Yang, Aopen's marketing manager. "That press release was not authorized by AOpen Taiwan and it inadvertently created a negative impression of not only AOpen, but also of Bernie Tsai, CEO of AOpen Inc," he added. |
SIS to showcase P4 in MunichBy Fuad Abazovic August 31, 2001 |
WE'VE JUST got word from SiS that it will be ready to present
its first Pentium 4 chipset in Europe, in the middle of
September. And the venue will be Munich, just two days before a Via conference starts. The SiS 645 will be presented to the audience by Alex Wu, Director of SiS. This will not be the first ever SiS 645 demo since the firm showed it to a large crowd of people in Taipei seven days ago. |
Intel goes bananas over BaniasBy John Leyden August 28, 2001 |
Intel Developer Forum Processors based on Intel's next
generation mobile architecture, codenamed Banias, will be
available in the first half of 2003, the chip giant told
attendees at its Developer Forum today. Banias processors are based on a new core design optimised for mobile applications, featuring low power circuitry and are designed to squeeze the maximum performance at lower power consumptions. These low power design techniques include the sizing of components on a chip and micro-opps fusion, which involves bonding instructions together so that a processor executes a number of instructions at a time. |
Intel Banias has die designsBy Mike Magee September 1, 2001 |
A STORY ON Tec Channel has more information about Intel's "Banias"
notebook chip. According to the site, which also has pictures of the designer and a die, the group developing the chip was involved in MMX design and the ill-fated Timna project. Perhaps that's not a good augury of things to come, but it seems from the article - and thanks to Tobias B for part-translating it - half of the die seems to made up of level two cache, with several micro ops executed in a single unit, taking something of a serial approach to the design. |
AMD's Hammer: rumours rampBy Mike Magee August 31, 2001 |
THE RUMOUR MILL is turning like a kid's windmill in a force 10
gale about AMD's up-coming Hammer microprocessor family and
how quickly the outfit can whop it out of the door, given
technical pressure from Intel. Just two weeks ago we reported on Via's K7 and K8 chipset plans in this and two related articles which appeared to show Via chipsets for the K8 arriving in Q1 of next year. And now, over at Chiptech there is word of an "unannounced" future South Bridge design. |
Morgan Duron datasheet a puzzleBy Mike Magee September 2, 2001 |
WE DON'T WANT TO overstate this, but we'd reiterate that if
AMD uses a "PR" style rating to compete with higher clocked
products from Intel, it will be its biggest marchitecture
error this year, last year, and the year before. Just to remind you - we wrote about Cyrix and its infamous PR ratings in Episode 26 of The Other Plaice, which you can find here. Is a Cox' Pippin the same as an apple, we asked then, and now, for that matter. The latest datasheet from AMD is wrapped up in enigmas which suggest them thar marketeers have been dabbling in technical matters that they don't really understand too well. |
McKinley joins fight against recessionBy Paul Hales August 30, 2001 |
AS GATEWAY has laid off a quarter of its workforce since we've
been here and even George jr. is reported in the US papers as
getting jittery about the state of the economy the final
keynotes here at IDF touched on what has become known as the
slowdown and what is sometimes called recession, though mostly
in hushed tones. Brit Sean "Home" Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Communications Group did allow the R-word to slip from his lips on the main stage here in Satan Clara, but only to explain that he'd been there before and to claim that the best way of dealing with negative growth is to come out the other side running when things eventually improve. |
Jacksonville Bugle trumpets Gelsinger co-efficientBy Andrew Orlowski August 30, 2001 |
Intel Developer Forum This week Intel finally cracked the
Gelsinger co-efficient, but our Pat was nowhere to be seen.
Also absent from the biannual forum was the CEO himself. Craig
Barrett was presumably riding his Pentium steed somewhere far
away on the other side of the Sierra Nevada. It's a shame Pat wasn't here to trumpet Jacksonville, Intel's multi-threaded chip technology. The implications of SMT chips haven't been fully appreciated yet, if the quick-rehash newswires are anything to go by. Jackson upsets - in the nicest possible way, for Chipzilla - the dynamics of server pricing. This may be down to the law of diminishing marketing returns, though. |
Chipset war ratches upBy Mike Magee September 3, 2001 |
THERE'S A COMPARISON AT OC Workbench between ALi, SiS, Via and
the AMD 761 which is well worth a read. Some words over at Ace's HW about AMD's plans to change the performance goalposts. More on AMD's Hammer at Overclockers. There are now reviews of the KT 266A over at Anandtech, at Accelenation, at Via Hardware at TomsHWG, and soon to be at AMD Zone too. Most say that the chipset vastly improves the performance of the KT266 for the Athlon platform. |
Acer Labs unwraps cheapest Pentium 4 chipsetBy Tony Smith August 30, 2001 |
Acer Labs has finally taken the wraps off its Pentium 4
chipset, the Aladdin P4 and has begun seeding the product to
mobo makers. And, at just $31 a pop, it's the cheapest P4 chipset in town, beating even VIA's controversial P4X266 on price. Acer wants to get the chipset into volume production in October, to which end it's producing the Aladdin P4 on a 0.25 micron process. |
VIA preps DDR333 Pentium 4 chipsetBy Tony Smith September 3, 2001 |
Apparently unconcerned by Intel's vague threats of legal
action over its use of Pentium 4 bus technology, VIA is
ploughing on with its P4 chipset plans. Having successfully launched the P4X266 last month - though not so successfully shipped it; the company has admitted to production shortages that aren't expected to be sorted until later this month - VIA is now readying the integrated P4M266 for volume production, as we've reported before. The P4M266 is now expected to ship in Q4. |
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