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01 00
Intel Celeron 533 on a 0.25 micron process was released on January 4th. This is the last desktop Celeron based around the Mendocino core.
Intel Celeron Price Cuts occurred on January 4th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
AMD Athlon 800 was released on January 6th on a 0.18micron process. It should be noted that almost all Athlons are currently being produced on the 0.18 micron process, although 0.25 micron stocks are still present. This makes the lower end processors very overclockable if you change the clock multiplier via the Golden Fingers.
ATI Rage 128 PRO based cards became available in early January. The Rage 128 Pro has both clock speed and architectural enhancements over the original Rage 128. The clock speed of the part is to be 125Mhz, up from the 105Mhz of the original Rage 128's core, and the memory speed is to be 143Mhz . Improvements to the architecture include a doubling of the setup engine performance, Ansiotropic filtering, improved 16bit image quality, video capture capability, MPEG decoding assistance, AGP 4X support, hardware bumpmapping and S3TC/DXTC. The estimated price of boards based around this chip are between $150 and $199.
ATI Rage Fury MAXX is the 64Mb dual-processor version of the ATI Rage 128 Pro and was released on January 6th. Containing two Rage 128 Pro chips running at 125Mhz and two banks of 32Mb 143Mhz SDRAM (one for each chip) this card is an excellent performer, particularly when running at 32bit high resolutions due to its effective fill rate of 500Mtexels/s (2 chips * 2 pixels/clock *125Mhz). The board uses ATI's Multiple ASIC Technology to split the rendering between the two chips. This system works by having each chip render alternate frames, effectively doubling the throughput of the card. Initial tests have shown that the boards performance is very promising. High resolution benchmarks (1024x768 and above) on high-end CPU's (PIII-600 or above) produce very impressive results, being up to 100% faster than TNT2 Ultra boards and generally faster than SDR, but not DDR, GeForce boards in current game benchmarks. Given a lower end CPU the board struggles against the SDR GeForce, producing scores similar to a TNT2Ultra. See the ATI Rage 128 Pro entry in the Roadmap for additional details about this chip.
VIA KX133 chipset was officially released on January 10th, providing the first alternative to AMD's 750 chipset on the Athlon platform. Essentially an Apollo Pro 133A for the EV6 (Athlon) bus, the KX133 features support for AGP4X, PC133 and ATA-66. Initial benchmarks suggest that this chipset is faster than the AMD 750, even if its Super Bypass feature is enabled. It also appears to have fewer hardware conflicts, specifically with Graphics Cards, than AMD's chipset. The first boards based around this chipset are expected to start shipping in March/April. It should be noted that the KX133 chipset is not fully compatible with the Thunderbird and Duron Socket A processors. See the Q2 2000 VIA Roadmap entries for additional information.
Pentium III Xeon (Cascades) at 800Mhz was released on January 12th on a 0.18 micron process. The Cascades core features Advanced System Buffering, 133Mhz FSB support and a variable sized on-chip L2 cache. The first processors come with 256Kb of L2 cache, with higher cache options available later in the quarter, and feature a Slot 2 interface.
Pentium III SpeedStep mobile processors at 650 and 600Mhz were released on January 18th. SpeedStep technology maximises battery life by dynamically adjusting the core speed of the CPU depending on power availability and battery life requirements. Both the 650 and 600Mhz members of the SpeedStep family throttle back to 500Mhz when running off the battery.
Transmeta's Crusoe series of processors were announced on January 19th. The architecture of these processors is significantly different from that of a traditional x86 CPU. The processors use (different!) 128bit VLIW instruction sets, with x86 compatibility provided in software (firmware). The architecture is designed with energy efficiency in mind, for use in the mobile market and for Linux-based Internet devices. Both of the two initial Crusoe processors dissipate only 1W at 1.6V and have the ability to change their clock speed and voltage on the fly.
The performance of these processors should be quite good, with Transmeta claiming that the high-end 700Mhz TM5400 is faster than a PIII 550 in 'traditional' benchmarks.
The TM3120 will be the first Crusoe processor to be released, with volume production already taking place. Operating at between 333 and 400Mhz, the TM3120 features 96Kb of L1 cache and supports a FSB of between 66 and 133Mhz. The processor features an integrated North Bridge and supports SDRAM only.
The TM5400 is expected to be released in Mid-2000 and will operate between 500 and 700Mhz. The TM5400 features 128Kb of L1 cache, 256Kb of L2 cache, and supports SDRAM at 66-133Mhz and DDR-SDRAM at between 100 and 166Mhz.
Intel Price Cuts occurred on January 23rd. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
AMD Price Cuts occurred on January 24th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
Netscape Mozilla 5 Alpha (M13) was released on January 28th.
02 00
AMD Athlon 850 was released on February 11th.
Mobile Celeron 450 & 500 (Coppermine-128) were released on February 14th. These processors are the first Coppermine-128 CPU's, who's features include a 100Mhz FSB, the SSE instuction set and 128Kb L2 cache. These low power devices are built on Intel's 0.18 micron process.
Windows 2000 was released to the general public on February 17th in its Professional, Server and Advanced Server forms. The cost for Windows 2000 Professional is $319, or $219 as an upgrade from Windows 9x and $149 as an upgrade from NT. Note that these prices are the same as those for NT4 Workstation, with the exception of the 9x to NT4 upgrade which is not available. Windows 2000 Server (5CAL) will cost $999, or $499 as an upgrade from NT4 Server. Windows 2000 Server (10CAL) is $1199, with an NT4 Server or Novell Netware upgrade available for $599. Windows 2000 Advanced Server (25 CAL) is $3999, with an NT4 Enterprise upgrade available for $1999.
AMD K6-II 550 was released on February 22nd. This CPU will be the last & fastest AMD CPU for Socket 7. The AMD K6-x+ CPU's will only be made available for the Mobile market.
VIA Cyrix III, formerly known as Joshua, was released on February 22nd. Based around the Cyrix MII core, the Cyrix III features a 64Kb L1 cache, 256Kb of on-die L2 cache, the 3DNow! instruction set, improvements to its MMX implementation and a dual pipelined FPU. Joshua is available in the Socket 370 form factor, supports 66, 100 and 133Mhz FSB speeds and is not clock multiplier locked. Parts are expected to ship around March/April at speeds of PR533 (433Mhz) and PR500 (400Mhz), where the PR rating gives the clock speed of an equivalent Intel Celeron CPU for Business applications. However, initial independent benchmarks show that a 400Mhz Cyrix III (PR500) runs slightly slower than a 400Mhz Celeron for Business applications and significantly slower for FP intensive applications and 3D games.
Intel Price Cuts occurred on February 27th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
AMD Price Cuts occurred on February 28th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
03 00
Sony Playstation II was released in Japan on March 4th.
The PS2 is comprised of four main execution blocks - the Emotion engine
(CPU and T&L), the Graphics Synthesizer ('Graphics card'), I/O
processor ('North/South bridge' plus a full implementation of the original
Playstation (!)) and the Sound chip.
The 300Mhz Emotion engine is the heart of the system and acts as both a
CPU (MIPS instruction set) and the T&L engine (it contains 2 vector
units as well as a traditional FPU). As a T&L unit, the Emotion engine
outperforms even a GeForce2 Ultra!
The 150Mhz Graphics Synthesizer is the 'Graphics card' of the PS2. The
featureset of the Graphics Synthesizer is rather different to the best PC
cards (e.g. it does not have support for Environmental or DOT3 Bumpmapping,
Cube reflection maps or texture compression, but it does have accumulation
buffer effects such as Motion Blur). The Graphics Synthesizer's fill rate
is pretty good, although its implementation is somewhat unconventional.
The Graphics synthesizer has 16 pixel pipelines (Compared to the
GeForce2's 4 pipelines), but texturing takes quite a hit (The GeForce2 can
apply 2 textures per pipeline per clock cycle). At 150Mhz we have a fill
rate of 2.4Gpixel/s untextured, which equates to 1.2Gtexel/s for 1 texture
or 600Mtexels/s for dual-texturing (the usual case). This compares to the
GeForce2 GTS which has a fill rate of 800MPixels/s or 1.6Gtexels/s (2
textures per pixel). The memory interface of the graphics synthesizer
consists of 4Mb of Embedded DRAM (with a 2560bit interface, although only
512bits can be used for texture lookups) giving a maximum texture memory
bandwidth of 9.6GB/s (compared to GeForce2 GTS' 5.3GB/s. Per pixel,
however, the PS2 has 600MB/s compared with GeForce2 GTS' 1.3GB/s). It
should be noted that the 16 pipelines of the PS2 can be wasted with small
polygons (a 4x4 pixel grid can be wasteful for small polys - the
GeForce2's 2x2 pixel grid with dual texturing per pixel can be more
efficient, particularly on small polys).
The I/O processor supports a full PS1 implementation, 2Mb of EDRAM, PS1
controller ports, a 'Magic gate' memory interface, 2 USB ports and a
400Mb/s Firewire port. The USB ports allow the attachment of keyboards,
mice, steering wheels etc, the Firewire port can be used for linking
machines together and the Magic Gate 8Mb memory card allows the transfer
of copyrighted files. The 2MB of EDRAM provides the playstation-on-a-chip
with its local memory (the PS1 has 2Mb of memory).
Finally, the PS2 features 32Mb of PC800 RDRAM, a 4X DVD-ROM (24X CD-ROM),
a 3.5" drive bay and is network upgradeable.
AMD Athlon 900, 950 and 1Ghz were released to leading manufacturers on March 6th. All three CPU's have their L2 cache clocked at 1/3 of the CPU clock speed.
Pentium III 1Ghz was released to large OEM's, specifically HP and IBM, on March 8th. It should be noted that volume production of this CPU is not expected until Q3.
Intel Coppermine Stepping 2 (cB0) was first introduced with the 1Ghz PIII on March 8th. The rest of the Pentium III family is now being migrated to this stepping. This second revision of the Coppermine core will give a slight increase in performance, allow the introduction of increased processor frequencies, remove the processor serial id present on previous Pentium III processors, update the microcode and fix the errata discovered since the release of Coppermine last October. The latest FC-PGA processors also come with a tighter Heatsink and Fan assembly. Unlike the previous stepping 1 (cA2) processors, both FC-PGA and Slot 1 processors are SMP capable. It should be noted that stepping 1 FC-PGA processors were not SMP capable.
Pentium III Xeon 866 (256Kb L2) was released on March 13th.
Pentium III 850 & 866 were released on March 20th.
Microsoft Office 2000 Service Pack 1 was released on March 21st.
AMD Price cuts occurred on March 24th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
Intel Celeron 566 & 600 were released on March 29th. These processors are the first desktop Celeron's to be built around the SSE-enabled, 0.18 micron Coppermine-128 core. It should be noted that these CPU's are available in FC-PGA format only (i.e. not PPGA) and run at a 1.5V core voltage as opposed to the 2.0V required by the Mendocino Celerons.
VIA Apollo Pro 133A Dual Processor was released on March 29th. This chipset is identical to the Apollo Pro 133 apart from its dual processor support and the ability to address up to 4Gb of memory.
