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01/99
Mobile Pentium II, formerly known as Dixon, released January 25th. Core is the same as a Celeron A, but with 256Kb rather than 128Kb cache. Performance of the chip has not yet been independently benchmarked, but is probably a few percent higher than a similarly clocked Celeron A, due to the additional L1 cache, and Pentium II, due to the cache running twice as fast. Intel claim a 10% improvement, but this is probably a best case scenario.
02/99
DirectX 6.1 officially released on February 3rd. Contains the DirectMusic component and adds KNI instruction usage to speed up Direct3D geometry calculations on the Pentium III. DirectMusic uses the Downloadable Sounds standard for MIDI Wavetable synthesis to ensure that users get consistent playback on any hardware configuration. In other words, its like a mixture of MOD's and MIDI!
Celeron price cuts on February 7th.
ATI Rage 128 based cards - ATI Rage Fury (£130) and ATI Xpert 128 (£80). They have been advertised since December, but are only just getting ready to ship - Stak will have some Rage Fury's on February 10th. Both the Xpert 128 and Rage Fury contain the same graphics processor, the Rage 128, but have different specifications with the Fury having 32Mb with TV out and the Xpert 128 containing 16Mb and no TV out. An All-In-Wonder 128 will also be released some time in March with a built in TV tuner as well as TV output. This will be available in both 16Mb and 32Mb SDRAM flavours.
The Rage 128 is a very similar card to the nVidia Riva TNT on paper. Reviews have shown it to be slightly slower in standard 16bit colour depth than the TNT for the lower resolutions (800x600 and below), but faster at higher resolutions. In 32bit colour the Rage 128 surpasses the TNT by some margin, showing a superior memory architecture. Image quality is excellent in both 2D and 3D DirectX6 and OpenGL applications, although games designed for DirectX 5 or earlier will suffer from relatively poor image quality.
AMD K6-3 released on February 22nd. The K6-3 is based around the K6-2 with CTX core, but with an additional 256Kb level 2 cache. Like the Celeron A series and Mobile Pentium II's, this cache will run at full clock speed - i.e. the same speed as the processor. In benchmarks the K6-3 has come out very favourably against both the Pentium II and Pentium III, usually beating a similarly clocked PII/III in Office type application performance. Game performance depends largely on the utilisation of 3DNow! instructions, but typically will be lower than an equivalently clocked PII due to an inferior floating point unit (FPU).
Windows 98 OSR beta 2 released on February 26th. The new build includes, amongst other things, an updated version of IE5, Internet Connection Sharing, DCOM95 1.3, Direct X 6.1 and support for Device Bay, Wake On LAN, ATM networks, USB modems, and the Euro currency.
Pentium III, formerly known as Katmai, in 450 and 500Mhz forms are released on February 28th. The processor is very similar to the Pentium II, containing the same 32Kb level 1, a slightly optimised core and the addition of 71 SIMD instructions to enhance floating point operations as used in 3D games etc. In business applications there is little difference in performance between a Pentium II and a Pentium III at the same clock speed (around 5%, due to the slightly improved core). Applications and games that make use the Streaming SIMD instructions should see increases of around 15%. Like with the introduction of the Pentium II, clock speeds should ramp up quite quickly - the 500Mhz processor has been known to operate at 620Mhz.
Pentium II price cuts will coincide with the launch of the Pentium III on February 28th.
Abit BX6-2. The successor to the Abit BX6, this board combines the advantages of the BH6 and BX6 and adds a few more facilities for good luck. Like the BX6 it has 4 DIMM banks. Like the BH6 it has 5PCI slots and 2 ISA slots. Additionally it supports 256Mb DIMM's, allowing 1Gb total memory, supports 'Instant-On', has the ability to monitor CPU as well as system temperature and supports 66-153Mhz front side bus speed with up to an 8x clock multiplier. This allows CPUs up to 1.2Ghz! 133Mhz FSB with 33Mhz PCI is also possible due to the new 1/4 speed PCI timing. The BX6-2's only minor flaw is an average, rather than remarkable, level of stability.
03/99
Pentium III Xeon, formerly known as Tanner, released on March 17th. Initially available at 500Mhz it will contain the Pentium III's Streaming SIMD instruction set and between 512Kb and 2Mb of external full speed Level 2 cache.
Windows 2000 beta 3 RC1 released on March 17th.
Internet Explorer 5 released on March 18th.
Celeron 433 released on March 22nd.
Western Digital Expert series drives are the first of the new second-generation 7200rpm drive series to have been tested by the Storage Review. Available in 9.1 and 18Gb capacities, they feature GMR technology, 4.6Gb per platter, 2Mb buffer, ATA-66 compatibility and a 9ms seek time. As you might expect from the the first of the second-generation 7200rpm drives, performance is extremely impressive. The Western Digital appears to be at its best under Windows 9x, although NT scores are still highly respectable being overtaken only by the Maxtor 5120 in the ATA market. Visit the Storage Review for a full account of this drive.
IBM Deskstar DJNA series come in 5400rpm (GP) and 7200rpm (GXP) formats with capacities starting from 18Gb (GP - 20Gb, 25Gb. GXP 18Gb, 22Gb). Even the 5400rpm drives annihilate all the previous-generation IDE drives in the market due to their exceptionally high areal density of 5.1Gb per platter and a full 2Mb of cache. The 7200rpm drives will perform even better - IBM claims 15.5 MB/sec for the Deskstar 25GP and 17.9 MB/sec for the Deskstar 22GXP. Comparisons with the other next-generation 7200rpm ATA drives has shown that the 22GXP has a very similar performance to the Western Digital Expert, i.e. leading edge Win9x performance but slightly behind the Maxtor under Windows NT. In fact the IBM and WD drivers are virtually identical in terms of specifications and even components - the metal housing and circuit boards are identical. The same similarity is found between the 5400rpm IBM GP series and the Western Digital Caviar series. The main differentiating factor between these drives will be cost and capacity, with the WD likely to be more cost effective, but the IBM drives being available in higher capacities.
