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10/01
nVidia GeForce3 Ti 500 was released on October 1st. The GeForce3 Titanium 500 is built on an enhanced 0.15micron process and features a core clock speed of 240Mhz, with access to 250Mhz DDR memory (effectively 500Mhz). This gives raw fill rates of 960Mpixels/s and 1.92Gtexels/s. The core of the GeForce3 Titanium is identical to that introduced with the original GeForce3. It has been reported that the core features Shadow Buffers and 3D textures, unlike the original GeForce3, but these features have always been in the core and have only been made available with the release of the Detonator 4 drivers. Initial benchmarks show this part to be around 10-15% faster than the original GeForce3, which is clocked at 200/230Mhz core/memory. The price of this part is expected to be around $349-$399 upon introduction.
nVidia GeForce3 Ti 200 was released on October 1st. The GeForce3 Titanium 200 is built on an enhanced 0.15micron process and features a core clock speed of 175Mhz and a memory clock of 200Mhz DDR (effectively 400Mhz). This gives raw fill rates of 700Mpixels/s and 1.4Gtexels/s. Initial benchmarks show this part performs at around 10% slower than a standard GeForce3, although this still gives it a healthy lead over the GeForce2 Ti, GeForce2 Pro and ATI Radeon 7500. Most importantly, however, is that this is a fully DirectX 8 compatible part unlike the competition. Initial prices are expected to be around $199. See the GeForce3 Roadmap entry for information about the core of this GPU.
nVidia GeForce2 Ti, the enhanced 0.15micron successor to the current GeForce2 Pro and GeForce2 Ultra, was released on October 1st. The GeForce2 Ti features a core clock speed of 250Mhz and a memory clock of 200Mhz DDR (effectively 400Mhz), giving raw fill rates of 1Gpixels/s and 2Gtexels/s. This compares against clocks of 250/240Mhz for the GeForce2 Ultra and 200/400Mhz for the GeForce2 Pro. As memory bandwidth is much more important than core clock speed the GeForce2 Titanium performs virtually identically to a GeForce2 Pro under most circumstances, which is around 70%-80% of the performance of the GeForce3 Ti 200. Initial prices for the GeForce2 Titanium is expected to be around $149-$175. See the GeForce2 GTS Roadmap entry for information about the core of this GPU.
ATI Radeon 7000 was released on October 1st. The Radeon 7000 is essentially a rebadged Radeon VE. The Radeon 7000 features up to 64Mb of DDR memory and is expected to retail for $79 at introduction. The Radeon 7000 has a 360Mhz primary RAMDAC and a 230Mhz secondary RAMDAC (used in the Dual Head cards).
ATI Radeon 7200 was released on October 1st. The Radeon 7200 is essentially a 64Mb version of the Radeon SDR and is expected to retail for $99 at introduction.
AMD Duron (Morgan) 1.1Ghz was released on October 1st. See the Morgan Roadmap entry for additional information about this core.
AMD Price changes occurred on October 1st. See the AMD CPU Prices page for additional information.
Mobile Pentium III Tualatin 1.2Ghz was released on October 1st.
Mobile Pentium III Tualatin 733, 750 & 800Mhz Low Voltage were released on October 1st.
Mobile Pentium III Tualatin 700Mhz Ultra Low Voltage was released on October 1st.
Mobile Celeron Tualatin 650Mhz was released on October 1st.
Intel Celeron 1.2Ghz (Tualatin-256) was released on October 2nd. This processor is based on the Tualatin core and features 256Kb of on-die L2 cache, although the Front Side Bus speed is still limited to 100Mhz.
Intel Price changes occurred on October 2nd. See the Intel CPU Prices page for additional information.
IBM Power4 1.3Ghz was released on October 4nd. The Power4 is the first commercially available processor to achieve in excess of 1000 CPU2000 SPECmarks.
AMD Athlon XP (Palomino) Desktop CPU was released on October 9th at clock speeds between 1.33 and 1.53Ghz. These processors are to be designated as Athlon XP 1500+ (1.33Ghz), 1600+ (1.4Ghz), 1700+ (1.47Ghz) and 1800+ (1.53Ghz) in order to help AMD market against the higher clock speeds of the Pentium 4 series. The 'PR' rating designates the approximate speed of an equivalent Pentium 4 processor. The Palomino core replaces the Thunderbird core. See the Mobile Athlon 4 Roadmap entry for additional information about the Palomino core.
Initial benchmarks show that the Athlon 1800+ outperforms Intel's 2Ghz Pentium 4 in the vast majority of benchmarks.
AMD Price changes occurred on October 9th. See the AMD CPU Prices page for additional information.
AMD Athlon MP 1500+, 1600+ & 1800+ (clocked at 1.33, 1.4 & 1.53Ghz respectively) were released on October 15th. These CPU's are based around the Palomino core and are identical to the Athlon XP's of similar designations except for the fact that they are certified for SMP use (this is not to say that Athlon XP's cannot be run in SMP mode, however!). See the Mobile Athlon 4 Roadmap entry for additional information about the Palomino core.
AMD Price changes occurred on October 15th. See the AMD CPU Prices page for additional information.
Transmeta Crusoe TM6000 1Ghz was released on October 15th. The TM6000 contains an integrated north and south bridge as well as integrated graphics.
Windows XP, formally known as Whistler and the successor to Windows 2000, was released on October 25th in its Personal and Professional forms. Based around Windows 2000, Windows XP (the XP stands for Experience) will feature a number of simplicity and ease of use features as well as COM+ 2.0 - the base of Microsoft's Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS). Windows XP will also feature XML/XSL-based customisation features (skinning), a quicker boot up time, improved scalability (>4 CPU's and >8Gb RAM) and enhanced deployment capabilities (remote server based installation, automated system recovery and file system volume snapshots). Other new features include Dynamic Update during installation (retrieving the latest device drivers over the net), 'AppFixes' which allow games which only install under Win9x to install on Windows XP, Windows Me style System Restore and Remote Assistance. Remote Assistance will allow users to log on to a system remotely (presumably over the internet) for maintenance purposes. Windows XP will also contain anti-piracy measures in its Retail and OEM forms. Internet or phone based registration, based on a machine-unique product activation key, will be required before it can be used. Corporations using volume licences will not be affected by this measure. Windows XP also features support for the latest hardware, including native CDR/CDRW support, 1394 Firewire and ATA100.
Windows XP will be made available in a number of formats - Personal Edition (supplanting Windows Me), Professional, Server, Advanced Server and Datacenter. Personal edition will only ship as a 32bit product, but the other versions will be made available for both 32 and 64bit platforms. The 64bit platforms will be able to run 32-bit windows applications through WOW64.
The prices of Windows XP editions is as follows: Home Edition: $99.99 upgrade, £199.99 full. Professional: £299.99 full.
Windows Media Player 8 is expected to be released alongside Windows XP on October 25th. Media Player 8 will feature DVD playback capabilities alongside a number of cosmetic and compression level improvements. Windows Media Audio 8 is expected to be able to deliver near CD quality sound at 48Kbps (compared to WMA7's 96Kbps and MP3's 128Kbps) and Windows Media Video 8 will deliver near DVD quality at 500Kbps. It should be noted that Media Player 8 will only be made available for the Whistler operating system - users of other versions of Windows will not be able to install it, although they will be able to download the WMA8 and WMV8 CODEC's for use with previous versions of Windows Media Player. This is apparently due to its tight integration with XP's new User Interface.
DirectX 8.1 was released alongside Windows XP on October 25th, and is the successor to DirectX 8.0a. DirectX 8.1 will feature, amongst other enhancements, a new Pixel Shader v2.0 specification. This increases the programmatic capabilities of the pixel shader and consists of the following enhancements (DirectX 8 pixel shader v1.1 spec in brackets): Maximum texture inputs 6 (4), Maximum program length 22 (12) - 6 (4) texture sampling, 8 texture addressing, 8 (8) colour blending, Instruction set 12 address/colour (12 address/8 colour).
Intel Price Cuts occurred on October 28th. See the Intel CPU Prices page for additional information.
AMD Price Cuts occurred on October 29th. See the AMD CPU Prices page for additional information.
ATI Radeon 8500LE was released on October 29th. The Radeon 8500LE is the lower clocked version of the Radeon 8500 being distributed by OEMs only (i.e. it will, not be a branded ATI product). The core clock speed of the Radeon 8500LE will be 250Mhz, with the memory clock determinable by the OEM (probably 250Mhz DDR).
11/01
VIA P4M266 chipset for the Pentium 4 processor was released on November 1st. The P4M266 is essentially a P4X266 with integrated S3 ProSavage 8 graphics and an enhanced South Bridge (supporting UDMA133 or optionally integrated 3COM networking). The P4M266 is pin compatible with the P4X266.
AMD Athlon XP 1900+ (1.6Ghz) was released on November 5th.
AMD Mobile Athlon4 1.2Ghz was released on November 12th.
AMD Mobile Duron 950Mhz was released on November 12th.
nVidia GeForce4 Go (NV17M) Mobile GPU was announced on November 12th, with availability expected towards the end of June 2002 (see the release Roadmap entry). The NV17M is the successor to nVidia's GeForce2 Go Mobile GPU and is based around a modified version of the GeForce3 core with additional power saving features and, optionally, on-package DDR SDRAM. NV17 is built on a 0.13micron process and will run at a maximum clock speed of 220Mhz, with the clock speed being adjustable to fulfil power saving requirements. The core features 2 pixel pipelines with 2 texture units per pipeline, giving a maximum fillrate of 440MPixels/s and 880Mtexel/s. The core also features better DVD hardware decoding then both the GeForce3 and Radeon (handling both iDCT and IQ processing as well as Motion compensation & Colour space conversion) and has TV-Out, CRT and DVI support with a 350Mhz RAMDAC. The Transformation & Lighting engine is at the GeForce2 level (i.e. it doesn't support vertex shaders) although it does contain the hardware FSAA and the LightSpeed memory architecture of the GeForce3 GPU.
The NV17M contains vNvidia's PowerMizer power saving technology. The frequency of the chip can adjust dynamically depending on the load placed on the GPU from the default 250Mhz down to 16Mhz at idle. The GPU can even freeze at 0Mhz for a short period of time! The user can control the level of power saving through the Display Properties dialog, with the choice being between Maximum performance, a Blended performance and Full Power Saving. The powerful DVD decoding capabilities of the NV17M is also expected to reduce overall power consumption noticeably (the CPU load can, for example, go from around 45% to 15% when utilising the hardware decoding capabilities of NV17M).
The NV17M will be made available with both on-package DDR SDRAM and without. The on-package DDR SDRAM version is called a Mobile AGP Package (MAP) and will be available with 16Mb or 32Mb utilising a 64-bit memory bus, or with 64Mb utilising a 128-bit bus. The on-package memory will be clocked at up to 220Mhz DDR (effectively 440Mhz). This gives a maximum memory bandwidth of 7GB/s with a 128-bit bus.
ATI Mobility FireGL 7800 Mobile GPU was released on November 12th. The Mobility FireGL 7800 is aimed to compete with nVidia's Quadro2 Go mobile GPU and features an optimised OpenGL driver.
AMD Duron 1.2Ghz was released on November 15th. See the Morgan Roadmap entry for additional information about this core.
Microsoft X-Box was released in the US on November 15th at a cost of $299. The X-Box features a 733Mhz Intel Pentium III processor with 128Kb L2 cache (unlike the Celeron, but like the Desktop PIII, the cache is 8 way set associative), a customised version of the nVidia NV20/GeForce3 graphics chipset (known as NV2A), nVidia supplied DirectX 8 3D sound with support for up to 64 3D audio channels (256 channel audio, with 64 of these having 3D hardware acceleration), 64Mb of 200Mhz 128-bit DDR UMA memory (equivalent to 400Mhz SDR, providing 6.4Gb/s of memory bandwidth shared between CPU and GPU), an 8 or 10Gb HDD (from Western Digital or Seagate respectively) and a 5X Max CAV DVD drive. The X-Box also has 4 USB-derived proprietary ports for controllers and includes 100BaseTX network connectivity. The networking capability is currently limited to using CAT5 cross over cable to link 2 machines together. X-Box runs on an NT-based platform, with an optimised and extended version of DirectX 8 being the primary API. An enhanced version of OpenGL will also be available for the X-Box.
The X-IGP forms the North Bridge of the X-Box and is essentially an nForce 420 core with an enhanced GPU core. The GPU runs at a clock speed of 233Mhz and features 4 pipelines with 2 texture blocks per pipeline, giving maximum fillrates of 1.86Gtexels/s or 933Mpixel/s. The graphics pipeline also features two programmable vertex shaders (compared to one in the GeForce3), which should provide a significant performance improvement in games which make use of vertex shaders - e.g. by implementing DOT3 bumpmapping. The second vertex shader means that the geometry throughput of the X-IGP is stated as 116.5Mtiangles/s! Like the GeForce3/NV20 core the NV2A features programmable pixel and vertex shaders along with occlusion detection, which removes overdraw and increases the effective fill rate to up to 4X the actual fill rate. In a move away from fixed-function hardware, which restricts developers creativity, the GPU's Vertex and Pixel shaders are fully programmable. The vertex shader is a programmable SIMD engine which, in addition to transformation, clipping and lighting, can perform user definable tasks which may include vertex blending, morphing, skinning, reflection maps etc. Up to 128 instructions can be executed on 192 quadwords of data. The Pixel shader is a programmable pixel processor which allows up to 9 instructions to be executed on each pixel.
Although the available memory bandwidth of 6.4Gb/s shared between CPU and graphics chip (the CPU can take a maximum of 1.06GB/s of this bandwidth over its 133Mhz FSB, leaving the GPU with 5.34GB/s) could be seen as a bottleneck, the lower resolution of X-Box games along with the bandwidth-saving features of the GPU will mean that this shouldn't be a major problem. X-Box supports TV-Out at 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i (where i = Interlace, p = Progressive scan and the number is the vertical resolution). The majority of games will be targeted at the non-HDTV resolution of 640x480.
The nVidia designed MCP-X (Media Communications Processor) forms the South Bridge (IO hub) of the X-Box and is identical to nForce's MCP-D. MCP-X runs at a clock speed of 200Mhz and is based on a 0.15 micron technology. The MCP provides support for 10/100 Ethernet, DSL/Wireless/56k modem, ATA 100 IDE, a PCI bridge and, most notably, an Audio Processor (APU). The APU of the MCP-X provides hardware accelerated DirectX8 audio. Featuring 4 independent audio processors, the APU can support up to 256 2D and 64 3D voices in hardware. 3D effects such as reflection, occlusion and reverb along with real-time encoding of Dolby Digital AC-3 will be fully handled by the APU, relieving the CPU of all audio tasks.
Windows.NET Server Beta 3, the Server editions of Windows XP, was released on November 16th. See the final Windows.NET Server Roadmap entry for additional information.
Nintendo Gamecube (N-Cube) was released in the US on November 18th. See the Japanese Roadmap entry for additional information.
VIA P4X266A chipset for the Pentium 4 processor was released on November 20th, with motherboards expected by December/January. The P4X266A is an updated version of the P4X266 with an enhanced memory controller, support for a 533Mhz FSB speed and ATA133 support via the VT8233A South Bridge.
Sun UltraSPARC III 1.05Ghz was announced on November 20th, with shipments expected within 90 days. This slightly updated version of the UltraSPARC core features an increased TLB size in addition to its 14-stage pipeline, 96Kb L1 cache (2 cycle, 32Kb instruction, 64Kb data), 2.4GB/s integrated memory controller and 2Kb prefetch cache.
IBM Summit chipset for Foster MP was announced on November 26th, with initial shipments expected in early January alongside the launch of Foster MP. The Summit chipset is features support for up to 16 processors, with each chip supporting up to 4 processors, hot swappable memory, PCI-X, Remote I/O facilities and Chip Partitioning (where different processors can run different operating systems). The Summit chipset will be modified for use with McKinley in 2002.
Windows XP Embedded was released on November 28th. Windows XPe is based around a componentised version of Windows XP, where the developer can adjust the featureset depending on the required functionality. The memory footprint can range from 4.8Mb on a minimal system to 70Mb fully configured.
SiS 650 chipset for the Pentium 4 processor is expected to be released in November. The SiS650 is essentially an SiS645 containing an integrated SiS315E graphics core. Motherboards based around the SiS 650 may also contain the enhanced SiS 962 South Bridge, which provides IEE1394 (Firewire) support.
Compaq Alpha 21264 1Ghz (EV68) is expected to be released in November. On release the 1Ghz EV68 will be the fastest commercially available CPU. The 833Mhz EV68 lost the performance crown to the P4 1.7 and PA8700 in SPECint_base2k and the Itanium 800 and P4 1.7 on SPECfp_base2k.
Microsoft Visual Studio.NET, the follow up to Visual Studio 6, is expected to be released to manufacturing in November. See the release Roadmap entry for additional information.
12/01
Intel Price Cuts, for the Pentium III, occurred on December 2nd. See the Intel CPU Prices page for additional information.
AMD Price Cuts occurred on December 12th. See the AMD CPU Prices page for additional information.
AMD Athlon MP 1900+ (1.6Ghz) was released on December 12th. See the Palomino Roadmap entry for additional information about this core.
AMD 760MPX chipset, the high-end version of the AMD 760MP chipset, was released on December 12th. The AMD 760MPX chipset uses the same AMD-762 North Bridge as the AMD 760MP, but replaces the AMD-766 south bridge with the new AMD-768 chip. The AMD-768 adds support for 66Mhz PCI and a bridge for a secondary 32bit/33Mhz PCI bus.
Microsoft Office XP SP1 was released on December 13th. Service Pack 1 integrates all previously released security patches alongside improved stability and significant performance improvements - particularly under Windows XP. Office XP is available as a 17Mb client or 40Mb administrative download.
AMD Mobile Duron 1Ghz was released on December 17th.
Intel i845-D chipset (Brookdale DDR), also known as i845B, for use with the Pentium 4, was launched on December 16th. Although Brookdale has always been DDR capable, issues with Rambus have prevented its use with DDR SDRAM up until this point. Pre-release benchmarks seem to suggest that the performance of the i845D will be competitive with, and in some cases surpass, VIA's P4X266 chipset.
Q4 01
Mac:Office 2001 for OS X was released in the Fall.
Bitboys Glaze 3D boards are expected to be released in H2 2001 (but did not ship). The Glaze 3D's XBA architecture will make use of embedded DRAM to allow exceptionally high fill rates, originally slated to be 1200 and 2400 MTexel/s before the release slippage from Q3 2000. Such huge fill rates will allow accumulation buffer effects such as full screen anti-aliasing to be used without a significant performance penalty. The Glaze 3D processor uses an 8 texel, 4 pixel per clock rendering pipeline and will run on a 0.17micron process. In order to supply the processor with enough data, Bitboys use their Xtreme Bandwidth Architecture, which makes use of embedded DRAM and a wide, 512bit memory bus to give up to 12.5Gb/s of memory bandwidth. The feature list of this chipset includes single-pass trilinear filtering, DirectX texture compression, AGP 4X support, environment bump mapping, multiple scaled video overlays, digital flat panel support and an accumulation buffer to support image quality enhancements such as full-screen anti-aliasing, depth-of-field effect, motion blur, soft shadows and soft reflections. The Glaze 3D will contain a transformation & lighting processor.
The original specifications for the first two Glaze 3D processors are outlined below. Note that these were based on a Q3 2000 release date with the chip running on a 0.2 micron process and no hardware T&L. Expect a higher initial clock speed and fillrate.
The Glaze 3D 1200 will contain a single 150Mhz Glaze 3D processor, and will be available in 41Mb (9Mb EDRAM, 32Mb SDRAM) and 50Mb (18Mb EDRAM, 32Mb SDRAM) forms.
The Glaze 3D 2400 will make use of two 150Mhz Glaze 3D processors running in parallel, and will come with 82Mb of memory (18Mb EDRAM, 64Mb SDRAM).
