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mike@mikeshardware.co.uk

Q3 2002

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07/02

Intel Itanium 2 (McKinley), the IA64-based successor to Merced (Itanium), was launched on July 8th. The first Itanium 2 processors have been released at clock speeds of 1Ghz (3Mb or 1.5Mb of L3 cache) and 900Mhz (1.5Mb L3 cache). McKinley is built on a 0.18micron process and has a huge die size - 465mm squared and containing 220m transistors (compared to Merced's 25m) in its 3Mb L3 cache form. Unlike Itanium, which uses a 64-bit double-pumped 133Mhz system bus, McKinley will run on a 128-bit double-pumped 200Mhz bus, giving a memory bandwidth of 6.4Gb/s compared to Itanium's 2.1Gb/s. The cache subsystem has been improved quite substantially, with all three levels on cache now being integrated onto the CPU die. The L1 cache consists of 16Kb Data and 16Kb Instruction, with a latency of 1 cycle, compared to 2 in Itanium. The 256Kb L2 cache now has a 5 cycle latency (compared with 12 on Itanium) and the L3 cache is on-die, also with a 5 cycle latency (compared to the 21 cycle delay in the off-die L3 cache of Itanium). McKinley features an 8 stage execution pipeline (compared to Merced's 10 stage pipeline), 1.5MB or 3MB of L3 cache and 6 integer units (4 M-Units and 2 I-Units) compared to the 4 of Itanium (2 M-Units and 2 I-Units). McKinley is also expected to feature less restrictive issue rules (the way instructions can be bundled and issued to the CPU - Itanium can concurrently execute 2 EPIC bundles of 3 instructions each, but the rules of this bundling may be relaxed in McKinley) and reduced instruction latencies. The processor itself will be housed in a cartridge containing an integrated PSU. The performance of a 1Ghz part is expected to be around 1.7 times that of an 800Mhz Itanium (initial benchmarks suggest 1.5 to 2X depending on the application), making McKinley approximately 35% faster per clock cycle.

Intel E8870, formally known as the i870, chipset for Itanium 2 (McKinley) was announced on July 8th, with availability expected in September. The E8870 is expected to support up to 4 CPU's per chipset and 8Gb of DDR SDRAM per processor. The chipset consists of three parts - a node controller (equivalent to a Northbridge), an I/O hub (equivalent to a Southbridge) and a Switch chip for scalability. The switch chip consists of a Scalability Port Switch and a Scalable Node Controller. The Scalable Port Switch (SPS) connects up four processors together, via 6.4GB/s point-to-point interconnects, and connects to the I/O hub. The SPS also allows chips to snoop each others local memory. The Scalable Node Controller (SNC) links each processor to dual channel DDR main memory (up to 8GB - 2 banks of 4x1GB DIMMs) and links the 4-unit processor clusters together. The I/O hub supports PCI-X and legacy protocols, and links the processor clusters to these I/O devices. The E8870 is expected to support up to 512-way SMP.

HP zx1 Chipset for the Itanium 2 was released on July 8th. The zx1 is a three chip solution designed for 1 to 4 processor systems. The zx1 uses dual channel DDR SDRAM to provide up to 12.8GB/s of memory bandwidth (in a 4 way SMP system).

VIA P4X400 chipset for the Pentium 4 processor was released on July 10th. The P4X400 is based around the P4X333, but also includes support for DDR400 SDRAM.

nVidia nForce2, formally codenamed Crush 18, for the AMD Athlon platform was announced on July 16th with motherboard availability expected in September. The nForce2 chipsets are the successors to the nForce 620-D and 615-D, which were never shipped, and the original nForce 220 / 420 and nForce 415. The nForce2 chipset comprises of four separate chips - two North Bridges and two South Bridges.

The two available North Bridges are the nForce2 IGP ('Integrated Graphics Processor') and the nForce2 SPP ('Systems Platform Processor'). The IGP contains an integrated NV17 (GeForce4 MX) clocked at 250Mhz, interfacing through to main memory over a 100Mhz bus - 33% faster than AGP 4X, and includes support for Dual CRT output through nVidia's View. Depending on the memory type used with the motherboard, the performance of the integrated graphics varies between a GeForce4 MX 420 and an MX 440. The SPP is the successor to the nForce 415, but unlike that North Bridge, which was identical to the nForce 420 but had the integrated graphics core disabled, the SPP is a completely separate chipset with no GPU core on-die. Common to both North Bridges are a 128-bit memory interface, which has been slightly improved over that present in the nForce 420/620D, an improved DASP which is more suited to the Athlon XP's cache, AGP 8X support and the support for DDR333 and DDR400 in addition to the DDR266 support featured in the nForce 220/420. The maximum addressable memory has also been increased to 3GB. The connection to the South Bridge is still made through an 800Mhz HyperTransport link.

The South Bridges are referred to as the nForce2 MCP ('Media and Communications Processor') and the nForce2 MCP-T (MCP Turbo). The MCP-T offers the same APU as the nForce 420D, but will ship with improved drivers to expose additional functionality, and will also offer a second integrated MAC from 3COM (as well as the integrated nVidia MAC - together called DualNet architecture by nVidia) and 2 x IEE1394 ports. The standard nForce2 MCP offers just AC97 audio and the built in nVidia MAC. Common to both South Bridges are support for 6 x USB 2.0 ports, and ATA133 support.

ATI Radeon 9000 (RV250) was released on July 17th, with availability expected soon. The RV250 is ATI's entry level, but fully DirectX 8 compliant, GPU. The RV250 is initially to be released at two performance levels. The high-end Radeon 9000 Pro is clocked at 275Mhz core and 550Mhz DDR memory, with the standard Radeon 9000 offering a 250Mhz core and 400Mhz DDR memory. The RV250 is a combination between ATI's previous R200 (Radeon 8500) core and their new R300 (Radeon 9700) core. The core features 4 pixel pipelines with 1 texture unit per pipeline (compared to 4 pipes/2 texture units for the R200 and 8 pipes/1 texture unit for the R300), more optimised caches than the R200, an upgraded triangle setup engine and ATI's FULLSTREAM technology, but otherwise offers the same featureset as the R200. The FULLSTREAM technology of the RV250 is a scaled down version of the R300's pixel shader onto video technology, which is intended to smooth out the compression artefacts found in low bandwidth video.

The performance of the RV250 is dependant on the application type. Generally speaking it falls in between the GeForce4 MX 460 and the Radeon 8500LE, but the full performance range is between the GeForce4 MX 440 and the Radeon 8500 - the RV250 performs best when not subjected to a great deal of multitexturing. The Radeon 9000 Pro is expected to sell for $129 and the Radeon 9000 for around $109.

ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (R300) was released on July 17th, with availability expected towards the start of August. The R300 is the first fully DirectX 9 capable part to be announced and is manufactured on a 0.15 micron process. The R300 core comprises of 107 million transistors and supports AGP 8X, Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0. The R300 core interfaces to on-board memory over a 256-bit memory bus, comprising of 4x64-bit independent memory controllers (rather like a wider version of the GeForce4's 128-bit crossbar memory controller), giving the Radeon 9700 a memory bandwidth of around 20GB/s. The Radeon 9700 is expected to be released at clock speeds of around 325Mhz core and 310Mhz DDR memory, although the exact clock speeds are still to be decided.

The 3D core of the R300 consists of 4 vertex decoders (twice the number found in the GF4 core) complying to the Vertex Shader 2.0 specification which, most importantly, provides support for 128-bit Floating Point numbers together with loop, jump and subroutine support in the vertex shader language. The vertex decoders feed into the Triangle setup engine which offers 1 triangle per clock setup performance (i.e. 300 million triangles/s on a 300Mhz core), which in turn feeds into the 8 pixel pipelines, via the HyperZ III culling engine, which is compliant with the Pixel Shader 2.0 technology. The pixel pipelines also offer 128-bit Floating Point support and contain 1 texture unit. DirectX 9's Pixel Shader 2.0 specification improves upon the Pixel Shaders of DirectX8 and 8.1 by offering 64 instructions per pass (compared with 12 in DX8 and 16 in DX8.1) and up to 16 textures can be applied to a pixel per pass.

The R300 core also features ATI's HYPERZ III, TRUFORM II, SMOOTHVISION II, FULLSTREAM and HYDRAVISION technologies.

ATI's HYPERZ III technology improves upon the occlusion culling HYPERZ II technology found in the R200 core in three ways. Firstly the compression algorithms have been improved allowing up to a 6X reduction of data using a lossless compression algorithm. Secondly the tag register for Fast Z-Clearing has been increased in size compared to previous Radeon cores allowing fast clear at resolutions above 1024x768. Finally ATI have introduced 'Early Z' which is a refinement of their Hierarchical Z algorithm which eliminates hidden surfaces down to the pixel level.

ATI's TRUFORM II technology adds a number of extra feaures to the TRUFORM engine present in the R200. TRUFORM II offers continuous tessellation, adaptive tessellation and displacement mapping (first introduced with Matrox's Parhelia).

ATI's SMOOTHVISION II technology provides the R300 core with a Multisampling algorithm (unlike the R200's costly, but effective, supersampling algorithm) that supports up to 6X sampling. Additionally SMOOTHSHADER II provides an adaptive algorithm that determines which parts of an image benefits from the superior ansiotropic filtering algorithm, optimising the image quality whilst providing good performance.

A new feature introduced with the R300 core is FULLSTREAM. This technology allows the processing of video streams in a Photoshop style manner. One use for this technology is to smooth out the compression artefacts found in low bandwidth video, although there are many other possibilties.

The R200 core also features support for ATI's Hydravision multi-monitor technology, allowing all combinations of CRT, Digital Flat Panel and TV outputs. The R300 core contains 2x400Mhz RAMDACs with 10-bit RGB and 2-bit alpha transparancy support. The core also provides a 165Mhz TDMS transmitter.

Initial benchmarks show the Radeon 9700 to be the fastest GPU available at the time of release by some margin. Under Non-Anti Aliasing conditions the Radeon 9700 can outperform the GeForce4 Ti 4600 by up to 50%, and with Anti Aliasing the Radeon 9700 can be up to 2.5 times faster than the GeForce card.

ATI FireGL X1 VPU was announced on July 24th, with availability expected in October. The FireGL X1 is the workstation version of the R300 core, featuring support for DirectX9 and OpenGL 2.0. FireGL X1 boards are expected to be fitted with 256Mb of memory.

Windows.NET Server RC1, the Server editions of Windows XP, was released on July 24th. See the final release Roadmap entry for additional information.

AMD CPU Price Cuts occurred on July 26th. See the AMD CPU Prices page for more information.

Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 was released on July 30th, and placed on Microsoft's web site on August 1st. Windows 2000 SP3 includes around 800 fixes in addition to those featured in Service Pack 2.

SiS R658 chipset for the Pentium 4 was released on July 31st. The SiS R658 is the first non-Intel RDRAM chipset to be released. The SiSR658 supports PC1066 RDRAM, with unofficial support for PC1200 RDRAM, and AGP8X. The SiS 658 additionally features a 1066MB/s link to the SiS 963 South Bridge which offers support for ATA133, 3 x IEE1394 and 6 x USB2.0 ports.

08/02

VIA KT400 chipset for the AMD Athlon processor was released on August 16th. The KT400 is the successor to the KT333, adding support for AGP 8X and DDR400 SDRAM. The the bandwidth of the V-Link North to South bridge link has also be raised to 533MB/s.

AMD Athlon XP 2400+ & 2600+ (Thoroughbred B) CPUs were released on August 21st, with retail availability expected in September. The Thoroughbred-B core is an enhanced version of the original 0.13 micron Thoroughbred core, designed to allow the XP to reach higher clock speeds. This has been achieved by a slight re-organisation of the core and by adding an extra metal layer. These help to improve speed paths throughout the core. Additional decoupling capacitors, which separate different areas of the core, have also been added to improve signal integrity & reduce Electromagnetic Interference. The core changes have resulted in a slight increase in transistor count, from 37.2M to 37.6M. The launch of the XP 2400+ and 2600+ on TBred-B also signals a change to the PR rating used by AMD. The 2400+ is clocked at 2.0Ghz and the 2600+ is clocked at 2.133Ghz, which is 66Mhz higher than would have been the case under the previously used PR system. This is to try to bring the Athlon XP more into line with the equivalently clocked Pentium 4. The Thoroughbred B core is expected to migrate down to slower members of the Athlon XP family over time. Initial overclocking experiments have shown that 2.4Ghz is a feasible overclock for this new core.

AMD CPU Price Cuts occurred on August 21st. See the AMD CPU Prices page for more information.

Microsoft Office XP SP2 was released on August 21st. Service Pack 2 for Office XP contains a number of security enhancements along with stability and performance improvements. Service Pack 1 must be installed before Service Pack 2 is applied. SP2 is a 15Mb download from Microsoft's Office site.

MacOS 10.2, codenamed Jaguar, was released on August 23rd. MacOS 10.2 features Quartz Extreme, a hardware accelerated version of Quartz, Inkwell handwriting recognition, Rendezvous zero configuration P2P networking, Sherlock 3 and a number of other improvements such as FreeBSD 4.4, gcc 3, IPv6 etc.

Intel Pentium 4 2.8 & 2.66Ghz (Northwood B) CPUs were released on August 25th. These processors introduce stepping 7 of the Northwood core (previous stepping was 4), which introduces an increase in the L1 Instruction cache's Translation Look Aside Buffer (TLB) from 64 to 128 entries. The instruction TLB is a cache of the Page Table, most of which resides in main system memory, who's entries are used to convert from Virtual to Physical memory addresses. The effect of the TLB size increase is to improve memory access latency, and as such offers slight performance increases for memory bandwidth intensive applications or those that use large datasets. Most applications perform no more than 1% faster, but some scientific applications can improve by up to 5% and games by up to 2%.

Intel Pentium 4 2.6 & 2.5Ghz (Northwood A) CPUs were released on August 25th.

Intel CPU Price Changes occurred on August 25th. See the Intel CPU Prices page for more information.

AMD Athlon MP 2200+ (Thoroughbred), the 0.13 micron successor to the Palomino core Athlon MP, was released on August 27th.

AMD CPU Price Changes occurred on August 27th. See the AMD CPU Prices page for more information.

ATI Radeon 9000 Mobility was released on August 29th. The mobile Radeon 9000 is based around the RV250 core, but contains additional power saving technology (dubbed POWERPLAY) and an improved video scaling algorithm. POWERPLAY is a combination of hardware and software designed to reduce the power requirements of the chip. The hardware side consists of the standard clock gating, clock throttling and voltage throttling techniques used by mobile GPUs along with LCD refresh rate modulation, where the refresh rate of the LCD panel can be reduced when running off battery power, and dynamic colour depth reduction. The chip can be reduced in 32 steps down to a 66Mhz core, running at 1.25v, and a 66Mhz memory clock. The POWERPLAY software is very well featured, allowing high degrees of customisation for the hardware features. The new video scaling core used by the Radeon 9000 Mobility scales the 2D image so laptop displays can be run at non-native resolutions.
The Radeon 9000 Mobility will be shipped in 5 varieties:

Radeon 9000 Mobility S64 Package - 250-260Mhz core, 230Mhz, 64Mb, 128-bit DDR memory.
Radeon 9000 Mobility E32 Package - 250-260Mhz core, 230Mhz, 32Mb, 64-bit DDR memory.
Radeon 9000 Mobility S64 Discrete - 250-260Mhz core, 230Mhz, 64Mb, 128-bit DDR memory.
Radeon 9000 Mobility E32 Discrete - 250-260Mhz core, 230Mhz, 32Mb, 64-bit DDR memory.
Radeon 9000 Mobility Desknote - 270Mhz core, 270Mhz, 64Mb, 128-bit DDR memory.

The core and memory clock speeds are customisable by the OEM, so different clock speed versions may well be released. The Package versions integrate both the GPU and memory onto a single package, much the same as nVidia's Mobile AGP Package (MAP). The Desknote variant of the 9000 Mobility GPU is intended for desktop computers using a laptop form factor.

Benchmarks indicate that the performance of the Radeon 9000 Mobility is between 5 and 25% faster than the previous fastest Mobile GPU, the GeForce4 440 Go. The Radeon 9000 Mobility is also the most feature-laden Mobile GPU, being the first generally available Mobile offering to feature Direct X 8.1.

09/02

Intel CPU Price Cuts occurred on September 1st. See the Intel CPU Prices page for more information.

Windows XP Media Center Edition was released to manufacturing on September 3rd. Windows XP Media Center Edition adds a friendly interface to Windows XP SP1 allowing the user to access multimedia such as digital music, photos and videos, DVD movies, TV, and digital video recording (DVR) using a remote control and, optionally, a TV set. Media Centre Edition is only expected to be made available for new Media Center PCs from companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Samsung, so will not be available in Retail outlets.

Windows Media Player 9 Beta 1 was launched on September 4th. Media Player 9 features include Smart Jukebox, a highly configurable user interface and support for new Windows Media 9 audio and video codecs.

Microsoft Works 2003 was released on September 6th. Works 2003 will be available in two forms. The standard Works 2003 package will feature a new version of Works along with a copy of Word XP. Works 2003 is expected to retail for around $99. Works Suite 2003 will feature the latest versions of Microsoft Word, Works, Money Standard Edition, Encarta Encyclopaedia Standard Edition, Picture It! Photo, and Streets & Trips. Works Suite 2003 is expected to retail for around $125.

Internet Explorer 6 SP1 was released on September 9th. IE6 SP1 is expected to roll up all the current hotfixes released for Internet Explorer 6.

Windows XP Service Pack 1 was released on September 9th. Windows XP SP1 will include all Post RTM security fixes, hotfixes and compatibility updates as well as a new version of MSN Messenger (4.7). SP1 will also include support for USB2.0, provide an optional .NET framework installation and support enabling technologies for Tablet PCs, 'Freestyle' PCs (Home entertainment and multimedia systems) and 'Mira' remote display hardware. WPA also contains some modifications, disabling keys that the majority of pirated copies of Windows XP are based upon. Consent decree compliance also ensures that SP1 contains a number of user interface component changes, allowing certain built-in components (e.g. Messenger) to be uninstalled. The service pack can be downloaded from Microsoft's site or via Windows Update.

Intel Xeon (Prestonia A) 2.6 & 2.8Ghz was released on September 11th.

Intel Mobile Pentium 4-M 2.2Ghz was released on September 16th.

Intel Mobile Celeron-M 1.8, 1.7 & 1.6Ghz, based around the P4 core, were released on September 16th.

Intel Mobile Pentium III-M 1.33, 1.26Ghz were released on September 16th. Other releases are PIII-M ULV 866Mhz & 850Mhz and PIII-based Celeron-M 733 & 700Mhz.

Sun UltraSPARC III 1.2Ghz was released on September 18th, with shipments expected by the end of the year.  The 1.2Ghz USIII is Sun's first 0.13micron CPU.

Intel Pentium 4 Celeron (Northwood-128) 2.0Ghz was released on September 18th. This is the first Celeron to be based around the 0.13micron Northwood, rather than 0.18micron Willamette, core. The core features 128Kb of L2 cache and runs on a 400Mhz Front Side Bus.

Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 was released on September 23rd with initial shipments expected in October. The Audigy 2 is based around the APU of the original Audigy, but contains an updated featureset. The Audigy 2 will be the first card to allow DVD Audio playback on the PC given a 6X or faster DVDROM, and provides 6.1 speaker support. The Audigy 2 is THX certified and supports Dolby's 6.1 format, Dolby Digital EX. Recording at 24bit/96Khz in 5.1 and 24bit/192Khz in Stereo is also supported. Like the Audigy, the Audigy 2 will turn off S/PDIF output when playing protected content to prevent piracy.

The SoundBlaster Audigy 2 is expected to retail for $129.99, with the SoundBlaster Audigy Platinum 2 going for $199.99.

AMD Mobile Athlon XP 1900+ & 2000+ were released on September 24th.

Darwin 6.0.1, an update to the core operating system of MacOS 10.1, was released on September 25th. Darwin 6.0.1 adds enhancements from FreeBSD 4.4 and to KAME IPv6/IPsec. Darwin 6.0.1 also features improved support for POSIX threads and adds a number of new and updated C libraries, including ncurses, bzip, and SASL.

nVidia GeForce4 MX 8X (NV18), the successor to the GeForce4 MX's NV17 core, was released on September 25th. NV18 is a minor update to the NV17 core, featuring support for AGP 8X. The GeForce4 MX 440 8X is the first GPU to make use of this new core, and features an improved core clock speed (275Mhz rather than 270Mhz). The memory provided with GF4 MX 440 8X cards is also clocked significantly higher than that of the original GF4 MX 440 (around 260Mhz DDR (effectively 520Mhz) compared to 200Mhz DDR (400Mhz)). These increased clock speeds, particularly the large increase in memory bandwidth, means that the performance of GF4 MX 440 8X boards is usually around 5-15% faster than the original boards, although up to a 40% speed improvement is possible.

nVidia GeForce4 Ti 8X (NV28), the successor to the GeForce4 Ti's NV25 core, was released on September 25th. The NV28 is a minor update to the GeForce 4's NV25 core , featuring support for AGP 8X. The GeForce4 Ti 4200 8X is the first GPU to make use of this new core. 128Mb GF4 Ti 4200 cards are expected to ship with faster memory - the original 128Mb GF4 Ti 4200 cards had memory clocks of 222Mhz DDR, but 128Mb GF4 Ti 4200 8X cards are shipping with memory clocks around 256Mhz DDR.

Windows XP Bluetooth support was released to manufacturing on September 26th.

ATI All In Wonder 9700 Pro was released on September 30th. The AIW adds Digital VCR/TIVO, TV and home video editing capabilities to the Radeon 9700 Pro. The AIW 9700 Pro runs at the same clock speed as the Radeon 9700 Pro and will retail for around $499.

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