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01
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ was released on January 6th at a clock speed of 2.2Ghz.
AMD Mobile Athlon 64 2800+, 3000+ and 3200+ were released on January 6th.
AMD Price Cuts took place on January 6th. See the AMD CPU Prices page for more details.
Mobile Celeron-M 1.2 and 1.3Ghz were released on January 6th. This processor is built around the Dothan core, but contains 1/4 of the L2 cache (512Kb).
ATI FireGL X2-256t was released on January 12th. The FireGL X2-256t is based on Radeon 9800 XT and runs at a core clock rate of 412Mhz.
02
Intel Price cuts occurred on February 1st. See the Intel CPU Prices page for details.
Intel Pentium 4 3.4Ghz was released on February 1st.
Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4Ghz was released on February 1st.
Intel Pentium 4 with SSE3 (Prescott) IA32 CPU, the 0.09micron successor to the Northwood core of the Pentium 4, was launched on February 1st. Prescott launched at clock speeds of 2.8, 3.0, 3.2 and 3.4Ghz with an 800Mhz (200Mhz Quad Pumped) Front Side Bus and a 2.8Ghz model without Hyperthreading on a 533Mhz FSB. Prescott features a number of architectural changes compared to the previous Northwood B core, including larger 1Mb L2 and 16Kb L1 caches, an improved branch predictor and pre-fetcher, an extra 13 instructions for accelerating media applications (SSE-3) and improved Hyperthreading (due to two of the additional instructions centred around thread synchronisation). All the additional core improvements previously mentioned are to try to offset the disadvantage of Prescott's longer 31 stage pipeline (compared to the 20 stage pipeline in Northwood) allowing Prescott to offer similar performance to Northwood at the same clock speed whilst allowing higher clock speeds to be attained. Generally speaking, initial benchmarks have shown that the highest clocked Prescott cores (3.2Ghz+) offer roughly the same performance as Northwood, whereas the lower clocked Prescotts offer inferior performance to an equivalently clocked Northwood (with current software). Breaking it down into application areas, Business applications perform about same as Northwood, Multimedia slightly better, Games marginally worse and Workstation tasks generally quite a lot better.
ATI Radeon 9700 Mobility (M11) was released on February 3rd. The Radeon 9700 Mobility is built on a 0.13u low-k dielectric and has a very similar architecture to the M10, including the same number of pixel pipelines (4?). The core clock speed of the M11 will be vendor set between 390 and 450Mhz, with the memory clock varying from 200-260Mhz. The M11 on its release is the fastest DirectX 9 GPU on the market offering on average 25% higher performance than the Radeon 9600 Mobility.
Windows XP 64-bit Edition for 64-bit Extended Systems Public Preview, for 64-bit AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 systems, was released on February 5th. It can be downloaded from Microsoft's web site here.
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition for 64-bit Extended Systems Public Preview, for 64-bit AMD Opteron and Athlon 64 systems, was released on February 5th. It can be downloaded from Microsoft's web site here.
Sun UltraSPARC IV processor was released on February 10th on a 0.13micron process. The UltraSparc IV features on-chip multiprocessing via two UltraSparc III derived cores, a 16Mb external L2 cache (8Mb per core) featuring 128-byte cache lines and the same system interconnect as the USIII, providing 2.4GB/s memory bandwidth. The UltraSPARC is initially availabe at clock speeds between 1.05 and 1.2Ghz.
VIA KT880 chipset for the Athlon XP platform was released on February 12th. The KT880 is the successor to VIA's KT600 chipset and will possibly be the last Socket A chipset to be released. The KT880, like nVidia's nForce2 chipset, features a dual channel memory controller and supports up to 8GB (more than a 32-bit processor can address!) of PC3200 DDR SDRAM. The KT880 will be paired with VIA's VT8237 South Bridge which offers native 2 channel Serial ATA 150 with RAID 0 & 1 support, 8x USB2 ports, VIA Vinyl 6 channel audio and 10/100 Ethernet. This platform is expected to provide strong competition to nVidia's nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset.
AMD Price cuts occurred on February 17th. See the AMD CPU Prices page for more information.
03
Xeon MP (Gallatin-4M) 3Ghz with 4Mb L2 cache was released on March 2nd. This processor is based on the original Gallatin core and features a 400Mhz FSB speed. To offset the effect of the slow FSB - only half the speed of recent Pentium 4s - the amount of on-die L2 cache has been increased to 4Mb.
Xeon MP (Gallatin) 2.2 and 2.7Ghz, with 2Mb L2 cache, was released on March 2nd.
Windows XP Service Pack 2 RC1 was released on March 17th. See the Windows XP SP2 Roadmap entry for additional details.
nVidia GeForce PCX 5950 was released on March 17th. This is the PCI Express version of the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.
nVidia GeForce PCX 5750 was released on March 17th. This is the PCI Express version of the GeForce FX 5700 / Ultra.
nVidia GeForce PCX 5300 was released on March 17th. This is the PCI Express version of the GeForce FX 5200 / Ultra.
nVidia GeForce PCX 4300 was released on March 17th. This is the PCI Express version of the GeForce4 MX 8X.
nVidia GeForce MX 4000 was released on March 17th. This is a renamed version of the GeForce4 MX 8X.
nVidia GeForce FX 5700LE was quietly released at the beginning of March. This GPU is a significantly lower clocked version of the GeForce FX 5700 with the core clock being 250Mhz and interfacing to 400Mhz DDR memory over a (slow!) 64-bit memory bus.
nVidia GeForce FX 5500 was quietly released at the beginning of March. This GPU is an enhanced version of the GeForce FX 5200's NV34 core, although what additional features have been enabled have not been publicised. The GeForce 5500 features a 270Mhz core clock interfacing to 400Mhz DDR memory over a 128-bit bus. It's performance is greater than that of the higher clocked 5200 Ultra although slightly less than it's current rival the ATI Radeon 9550.
SiS 756 chipset for the Athlon 64 series was announced on March 18th, with availability expected in Q1 2005. The SiS756 is the successor to the SiS 755FX, featuring support for PCI Express x16 and 1GHz Hypertransport. The SiS 756 chipset is paired with the SiS 965 South Bridge via a 1GB MuTIOL link which provides support for PCI-E x1, Gigabit LAN, 8 USB 2.0 ports, AC 97 7.1 channel sound, 4 SATA and 4 PATA IDE channels. RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and JBOD are supported by the South Bridge.
SiS 656 chipset for the Pentium 4 series was released on March 18th. The SiS756 features support for PCI Express x16, dual channel DDR400 (6.4GB/s) and DDR2 667 (10.6GB/s). The SiS 656 chipset is paired with the SiS 965 South Bridge via a 1GB MuTIOL link which provides support for PCI-E x1, Gigabit LAN, 8 USB 2.0 ports, AC 97 7.1 channel sound, 4 SATA and 4 PATA IDE channels. The RAID 0, 1, 0+1 and JBOD are supported by the South Bridge.
nVidia Quadro FX 700 & 600 GPUs were released on March 18th. These solutions are aimed at the lower end of the market, with the 600 series being PCI based. These cards have passive cooling for silent operation.
AMD Athlon 64 FX-53, in the Socket 940 form factor, was released on March 18th. The Athlon 64 FX-53 runs at a clock speed of 2.4Ghz, contain 1Mb of L2 cache and is expected to be the last CPU to be released for the Socket 940 platform.
nVidia nForce3 Pro 250 for Socket 754 was released on March 23rd (Kind of! 'Announced' on Sept 23rd 2003). In addition to the featureset of nForce3 Pro 150, nForce3 Pro 250 features Gigabit Ethernet support, 2xUATA133 channels and 4xSATA150 channels. nForce3 Pro 250 is also certified for Multi Processor operation.
Athlon 64 2800+ was released on March 30th. The 2800+ model is based around the Newcastle core and runs at a clock speed of 1.8Ghz.
Q1
VIA PT890 for the Pentium 4 processor is expected to be released in Q1. The PT890 chipset is the successor to the VIA PT800 chipset, providing support PCI Express, a dual channel 64-bit memory bus, the support for DDR266/333/400 and DDR2 400/533/667, both AGP8X & PCI Express x16 and PCI Expressx4.
Mobile Celeron-M 1.4Ghz is expected to be released in Q1.
Compaq Alpha EV79, the last in the Alpha series and the successor to EV7, is expected to be released in Q1.
Xeon (Prestonia) 3.2Ghz is expected to be released in Q1.
