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10/03
Intel Xeon 3.2Ghz (Prestonia), for both 400Mhz and 533Mhz FSB speeds, was released on October 6th.
Windows XP Update Rollup 1 was released on October 16th. The Update Rollup features all the critical updates released up until this point packaged as a single, installable file.
Microsoft Office 2003 was released on October 21st. The successor to Office XP, Office 2003 incorporates an additional two products - Office OneNote 2003, a note capture and organization tool, and Office InfoPath 2003, an information gathering tool for teams and organizations. Also included are updated versions of Word, Access, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint along with the web-based Windows Sharepoint Services and Office Online Services. Office 2003 features increased XML support to improve data linkage between applications, a new user interface (e.g. Outlook will feature a vertically split window rather than the current horizontally split window), ClearType technology, Digital Ink support for the Tablet PC, improved rights management (e.g. protected emails that can't be copied, cut to the clipboard or printed), Email spam filtering and a persistent Query window. It should be noted that Windows 9x support has officially been dropped for Microsoft Office 2003.
nVidia GeForce FX 5950 Ultra (NV38) was released on October 23rd. NV38 is the successor to NV35 featuring a slightly optimised core and a higher clock speed (475Mhz core, 950Mhz memory over a 256-bit bus compared to the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra's 450Mhz core and 850Mhz memory). Initial benchmarks show the 5950 Ultra to be roughly on a performance par, with current games using Detonator 50 drivers, to the newly introduced ATI Radeon 9800 XT. It will be interesting to see how it's performance compares with ATI's with future games such as Doom III and Half Life 2 (I suspect it will still be slower than ATI cards with this HL2 and perhaps slightly faster with Doom III).
nVidia GeForce FX 5700 (NV36) was released on October 23rd. NV36 is the successor to NV31 (the GeForce FX 5600 series) and contains a number of technologies first introduced in NV35 (GeForce FX 5900 series). The GeForce FX 5700 adds an additional 2 vertex processing pipelines to the single pipeline of the NV31 (i.e. it now has 3 pipes rather than 1) and has nVidia's UltraShadow technology and NV35's colour, Z and texture compression technology. The FX5700 Ultra is built on IBM's 0.13 micron process and runs at a clock speed of 475Mhz core and 900Mhz memory over a 128-bit bus (compared to the FX5600's 400Mhz core / 800Mhz memory) - a 12.5% increase in memory frequency and a 19% increase in core frequency.
Initial benchmarks show that the FX5700 Ultra performs significantly better than the FX5600 Ultra, beating even ATI's Radeon 9600 XT with a slight majority of current benchmarks.
Mac OS 10.3 'Panther' was released on October 23rd.
Intel CPU Price cuts occurred on October 26th. See the Intel CPU Prices page for additional information.
AMD CPU Price cuts occurred on October 27th. See the AMD CPU Prices page for additional information.
11/03
Intel Celeron 2.8Ghz was released on November 5th.
SiS R659 chipset, for the Pentium 4, was released on November 6th. The R659 is the first chipset to use 4 x 16bit, 1200Mhz RDRAM channels, delivering 9.6GB/s of memory bandwidth. Although this amount of memory bandwidth is substantially higher than even an 800Mhz FSB P4 can utilise, the additional bandwidth is made use of by the Dynamic Look-ahead Cache and Adaptive Page Management features of the chipset. This technology effectively reduces the memory latency for the processor.
Initial tests show that the R659 can deliver very impressive performance. The performance of the R659 can be up to 12% better than Intel's i875P - the previous fastest P4 chipset. Most memory-bandwidth limited applications show significant increases in performance - e.g. Quake 3 and RTCW are around 7% faster on the R659.
SiS 755FX chipset for Socket 939 was announced on
November 13th, although it did not appear in retail until December 2004. The SiS 755FX
is based around the
SiS 755 chipset, but additionally features
a 1Ghz HT link and Dual Channel memory support for Socket 939. Initial
performance figures suggest that the chipset offers similar performance to the
nForce3/4 series, offering great performance at a very good price.
AMD Opteron 148, running at 2.2Ghz, was released on November 17th. The 2.2Ghz model Opteron processors are expected to feature support for PC3200 ECC DDR SDRAM - previous Opterons only supported PC2700.
AMD Opteron 248, running at 2.2Ghz, was released on November 17th
AMD Opteron 848, running at 2.2Ghz, was released on November 17th
nVidia GeForce FX Go 5700 was released on November 17th. The GeForce FX Go 5700 is based around the GeForce FX 5700.
12/03
nVidia Quadro FX 1100, based around the NV36 (GeForce FX 5700 core) was released on December 3rd.
VIA K8M800, for the Athlon 64/Opteron, was released on December 15th. The K8M800 is based on K8T800, but includes integrated S3 UniChrome Pro graphics.
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Newcastle) could first be purchased (although it was never officially released) in Late December. The Athlon 64 3000+ contains 512Kb L2 cache, rather than 1Mb.
Mobile Intel Pentium 4 548 was released on September 28th. This processor is intended for desktop replacement laptops and runs at a clock speed of 3.33Ghz. The Mobile P4 548 features Hyperthreading technology and Enhanced Speedstep.
Q4/03
Intel i855GME chipsets, formally known as Montara GME, for the Dothan processor is expected to be released in Q4. The i855GME is an enhanced version of the i855GM chipset.
Intel i852GME chipset for Dothan is expected to be released in Q4.
DDR II SDRAM is expected to become available in late 2003 (possibly 2004). DDR-II is expected to be made available as DDR400, DDR533 and DDR600 modules, with the initial DDR400 modules offering a memory bandwidth of 3.2Gb/s. Unlike standard SDRAM and DDR SDRAM, which use TSOP packaging and run at 3.3 or 2.5v, DDR-II modules will ship in BGA or TSOP-II packages and will require 1.8v. DDR-II is backwardly compatible with DDR, allowing the use of DDR modules in DDR-II motherboards.
Windows XP Media Center Edition Version 2 is expected to be released in Late 2003 / Early 2004. Windows XP Media Center Edition 2 is the successor to Windows XP Media Center Edition.
