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04/99
Internet Explorer 4.01 SP2 released on April 5th, containing the bug fixes accumulated over the last year since IE4.01 SP1 was released.
AMD K6-2 475 released on April 5th.
3dfx Voodoo 3 2000/3000 released on April 7th in the US, with the V3-3500 scheduled for release at a later date.
The V3-2000 has a clock speed of 143Mhz, a 300MHz RAMDAC and 16MB of SDRAM. The suggested US retail price is $129.99. It is available in both PCI and AGP formats and comes with an Eidos CD containing a number of Game demos.
The V3-3000 has a clock speed of 166Mhz, a 350MHz RAMDAC, 16 MB of SDRAM and TV/S-Video Out. The suggested US retail price is $179.99, which includes a game bundle comprising of Need for Speed III, Descent 3 Sol Ascent (five levels only), and Unreal, along with a coupon for Unreal tournament, when it is available. The European game bundle will replace Need For Speed III with Fifa '99. It is available in AGP form only.
Unlike Voodoo 2, but similar to the Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo 3 cards will be 2D/3D combos. Hard core gamers with Voodoo 2 SLI setups will not find much of a performance increase even with the V3-3500 which has a fill rate of 366Mtexels/s as opposed to the V2-SLI's 360Mtexels/s. Image quality and large texture support are also issues for the chip as it will not support 32bit colour depth and, like Banshee and V2, does not fully support AGP - it uses its own proprietary DME texture transfer as opposed to AGP texturing. The maximum memory capacity of the chip is also only 16Mb. Never the less, the sheer speed and value for money of the Voodoo 3 series will keep it highly competitive with the other next-generation cards, notably the TNT2 series. Recent reviews, although often contradictory, have tended to show that the image quality of the card when rendering to 22bit internal colour depth is perfectly adequate, if not quite up to that of the TNT2.
Pentium III Xeon 550 released on April 7th, initially with 512 KB L2 cache for two-way workstations and server. 550Mhz processors with larger caches and suitable for 4-way and higher systems are expected in Q3.
Windows 98 Second Edition RC1 (build 2183) was released in the second week of April.
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 5120 series drives are now available. Features of this drive series are a 7200rpm spindle speed, 5.1Gb per platter, 1Mb Cache, 9ms seek time and a shock protection system. Initial implementations of the drive are not ATA-66 compatible, although this is not necessarily a bad thing - ATA-66 is not implemented in any motherboard chipset to date, has no performance benefit with today's hardware and can cause problems with a number of current motherboards (although you should be able to turn it off with vendor supplied software). As is usual for Maxtor drives, Window NT performance is exceptionally good, beating the Western Digital Expert series by around 15%. Windows 9x performance is very good, but the drive is beaten to the ATA top-spot by the Western Digital drive by a similar 15% margin.
Intel price cuts have been made on April 12th.
Western Digital Caviar series. Western Digital's latest version of the 5400rpm Caviar (The 20.4Gb AC420400, 15.3Gb AC15300 and 10.2Gb AC210200) shares a number of features with its 7200rpm brother, the Expert. Features include ATA-66 capability, 5.1Gb/platter areal density and 2Mb of buffer. Tests performed by the Storage Review indicate that this drive is the fastest available 5400rpm drive in Windows 9x, although the Maxtor DiamondMax 4320 series still comes out on top in Windows NT performance. Its main competition in the 5400rpm arena will come from the IBM Deskstar 25GP and Quantum's Fireball CX.
Windows 98 Second Edition RC2 (build 2185) was released in the third week of April.
Intel Celeron 466 was released on April 26th.
Intel i810 chipset was released on April 26th. The i810 is a Socket 370 only chipset, but will support both the current 66Mhz bus speed and the forthcoming 100Mhz bus speed. The i810 will also support UDMA/66 and contain the i752 graphics chipset and the new Accelerated Hub Architecture. The integrated i752 can use system memory for its display buffer, although motherboard manufacturers have the option of supplying a 4Mb dedicated display cache. The performance of this part is similar to a single Voodoo2 - certainly not cutting edge - with 3 million triangle/s, 100Mpixels/s, an AGP 2X interface but no 32bit colour support. The Accelerated Hub Architecture improves upon the I/O design of previous chipsets by providing direct interfaces to subsystems such as those associated with Audio, Modem and IDE devices. This removes the bottleneck of the PCI bus when communicating with these peripherals, doubling the bandwidth available to these components from PCI's 133Mb/s up to 266Mb/s. Altogether the i810 is a significant improvement over the current 440ZX Socket 370 chipset, especially for those who do not require a high-end 3D accelerator. See the Tips page for a comparison of Intel's chipsets.
Windows 2000 beta 3, containing a version of DirectX 7 was released on April 29th. A Win98 version of DirectX 7 will not be available until DX7 beta 2.
Microsoft Office 2000 was released on April 29th.
05/99
Windows NT4 Service Pack 5 was released on May 5th. Additional features and bug fixes include Windows 2000 NTFS support, Y2K fixes, Setup and Installation improvements, Option Pack fixes, the Euro key patch, Internet Group Management protocol v2, File and Print Service for Netware on Client32, Proquota utility to monitor user profile sizes, Active Accessibility support, Improved DCOM/HTTP Tunneling, Security Configuration Manager, Secure Channel enhancements and DHCP/WINS/DNS improvements.
Quantum Fireball Plus KA series is Quantum's first 7200rpm hard drive and is another next-generation drive, boasting the first sub-9ms seek speed of any ATA drive series. The Fireball Plus KA also features an areal density of 4.6Gb per platter, an 8.5ms seek time, 512Kb of cache and ATA-66 compatibility. Tests performed by the Storage Review indicate that the performance of this drive series is similar to that of the Maxtor DiamondMax 5120 - outpacing the Western Digital and IBM 7200rpm drives under Windows NT but falling behind under Windows 9x.
nVidia Riva TNT2 based products have been released around 6/7th May in their 125Mhz core/150Mhz memory clocked form. The Diamond Viper V770, which is based on the 125/150Mhz TNT2, is to retail at $199.95. The TNT2 is based around an enhanced Riva TNT core which includes a 0.25micron die (a shrink from the 0.35micron die of the current TNT), an enhanced rendering pipeline, hardware motion compensation for DVD playback and hardware 'embossed' bumpmapping support. The improvements to the core give a 5 -10% performance boost over a similarly clocked TNT in 16bit and reduce the 32bit colour depth hit from up to 50% in the TNT to around 10-25% for the TNT2. The TNT2 also supports AGP4X, 32Mb of memory, a 300Mhz RAMDAC and digital flat-panel displays.
Advantages of TNT2 over Voodoo 3
32bit rendering, superior image quality, full AGP texturing support, AGP 4X,
full OpenGL ICD, 32Mb support (as opposed to 16Mb), larger texture support (2048x2048 rather than 256x256 pixels),
24bit Z-buffer and 8 bit stencil buffer (as opposed to a 16bit Z-buffer. This
allows the rendering of more complex scenes without dropping polygons -
something that will be made use of in Quake 3 Arena and Epic's Unreal Tournament
Edition).
Disadvantages:
Inferior 3DNow! performance, 300Mhz rather than 350Mhz RAMDAC, Later release date than similarly clocked Voodoo 3's. From initial previews the V3-3500 is a faster board then the 150/183Mhz TNT2 Ultra. The Ultra is likely to be competitive, speed-wise, with the V3-3000 and the standard TNT2 will compete with the entry level V3-2000.
S3 Savage4, the successor to the Savage3D, is to be released from a number of suppliers including Creative and Diamond around 14/15th May. Boards will be available in four forms (Core clock / Memory clock, Memory size) - LT (110/110 8Mb), GT (110/125 16Mb), Pro (110/125 32Mb) and Pro 143 (125/143 32Mb). The Non-pro boards have a 270Mhz RAMDAC and the Pro boards have a 300Mhz RAMDAC. The cost of the Savage4 Pro 143 based Diamonds Stealth III S540 is to be $129.95. The Savage4 Pro looks as it it will be a strong competitor for the 125Mhz TNT2, although initial reviews suggest that its performance is not quite as good. The Savage4 will support AGP 4X, S3TC texture compression, single cycle trilinear filtering and Digital Flat Panels. Like the Rage128 cards the Savage4 will contain Motion compensation and Hardware sub-picture blending to accelerate and improve MPEG2 decoding for DVD. Perhaps the most impressive feature of the Savage4 is S3's texture compression technology, called S3TC. Initial demonstrations of the technology, which allows significantly larger and more detailed texture maps, have been very well received among the gaming community. S3 is working with a number of developers on titles such as Unreal Tournament Edition and Quake 3 Arena to get S3TC support into forthcoming games.
Intel Price cuts have been made on May 16th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
Pentium III 550 has been released on May 16th.
nVidia Riva TNT2 Ultra is to be released around 21/22nd May. The Ultra is simply a higher-clocked TNT2, with the majority of cards running at the nVidia recommended core speed of 150Mhz and Memory speed of 183Mhz. There are, however, higher clocked cards planned, such as the 175/200Mhz Hercules Dynamite TNT2 Ultra.
06/99
AMD K6-3 475 released at the start of June.
Intel Price cuts are expected on June 6th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
Microsoft Office 2000 is released in the UK on June 8th.
Windows 98 Second Edition is shipped on June 10th, following an RTM on May 5th. The update is available in three forms - a Retail product (Windows 98 Second Edition) , a Retail update kit (StepUp) and a bug-fixes only Service Pack (SP1). Windows 98 SE is a retail product available for those wishing to upgrade from Windows 95 or 3.1, and will be available for $89. StepUp is another retail product which will cater for those who already own Windows 98, and want the additional functionality included in Second Edition. StepUp will be made available for online purchasers on Microsoft's web site for around $20. The Service Pack is available free of charge from Windows Update, but will be a bug fix only, and will not include any additional components, such as driver updates, IE5, DirectX6.2, IE5 etc. Most, but not all, of these components will also be available for download via Windows Update.
Windows 98 SE will include Internet Explorer 5, Internet Connection Sharing (ICS), DCOM95 1.3, Direct X 6.2 and support for Device Bay, Wake On LAN, ATM networks, USB modems, and the Euro currency.
AMD K7 (Athlon) was officially released on June 23rd, although volume rollout will not occur until August. The processor is initially released at 500, 550 and 600Mhz with a 200Mhz FSB speed, utilising Digitals EV6 bus protocol on Slot A based motherboards. There have been rumours that a 200Mhz FSB speed is not practical due to the lack of 200Mhz memory modules. This is not correct however - the 200Mhz EV6 bus links the CPU to the chipset, and is not the link to main memory. The chipset itself has busses to main memory, AGP, PCI etc, with the memory bus speed determined by the chipset. Unlike the Pentium II/III's GTL+ bus which is shared between all processors in SMP systems, the EV6 provides a separate 200Mhz bus for each CPU. This increases scalability (i.e. >4 processors may be used - the theoretical maximum is 14 processors) and reduces bus contention. Unfortunately, the expected 3rd party chipsets (manufactured by VIA, SiS etc) will not appear until next year, leaving just the single-processor capable AMD chipset available upon release. Dual processor and higher chipsets are expected to be released by AMD 'in the future', and will support DDR SDRAM, RDRAM and DDR-2 SDRAM in addition to the current PC100 & PC133 SDRAM support.
The processor has 128Kb of L1 cache - four times that of the Pentium III - and supports between 512Kb and 8Mb of L2 cache which can run between 1/4 and full clock speed. Although evaluation units have been equipped with 512Kb of L2 cache running at 1/3 clock speed, the final product has been released with 512Kb of L2 running a 1/2 clock speed. The K7 also contains an enhanced version of the 3DNow! instruction set of the K6-2/3. As well as optimising the efficiency of the K62/3 instruction set, an additional 19 SIMD instructions and 5 DSP functions have been added. The new SIMD instructions help to increase integer and cache performance, and the DSP extensions are intended to help encode & decode multimedia formats such as MP3.
The performance of the K7 should be noticeably higher than an equivalently clocked Pentium III. Floating point performance in particular should be a great deal better than rival x86 chips, with a peak throughput of 1GFLOP at 500Mhz for non-3DNow! instructions (2GFLOP for 3DNow! instructions). In comparison, a Pentium III has a peak performance of 500MFLOPS with non-SSE instructions and the K6-3 has a peak of 225MFLOPS for non-3DNow! instructions at 500Mhz.
Initial benchmarks from AMD have given a specInt performance 5% faster than an equivalently clocked Xeon, and a specFP performance 38% faster. A null-driver Winbench 99 score, comparing optimised 3DNow! vs SSE performance, yields a 40% speed increase. These tests are on a 550Mhz K7 running with half speed L2 cache against a 550Mhz Xeon with full speed L2 cache (the cache size is not known, but will be fairly irrelevant with these 'core' benchmarks).
Recent independent benchmarks show that the K7 really is faster than an equivalent PIII in all areas - business applications, multimedia, games and even disk I/O. For users wanting the best 3D performance available, the K7 is definitely the CPU of choice.
Future incarnations of the K7 will use up to a 400Mhz front side bus speed, and run on 0.18micron technology with copper interconnects (the initial incarnation will be on 0.25micron with the 0.18 micron product due in Q499).
Maxtor DiamondMax 6800 drive series is to enter volume production in June. This 5400rpm drive series features a 6.8Gb/platter areal density, 2Mb buffer, 9ms seek time, a UDMA-66 interface and capacities up to 27.2Gb. Improvements have also been made to the controller interface and the ShockBlock and MaxSafe data protection systems.
