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10/99
AMD Athlon 700 was released on October 4th.
AMD Price cuts are expected on October 4th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
nVidia GeForce 256, formally known as the NV10, will be incorporated on a number of boards due for release throughout October. One of the major improvements to be debuted with this card is the addition of Hardware Transformation and Lighting provided by the built-in Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This facility offloads many of the calculations currently performed by the CPU onto the Graphics card. With the impressive fill rates available form the latest graphics cards, the CPU has become one of the major bottlenecks to 3D rendering. The offloading of calculations to the graphics card will remove this bottleneck, improving performance for all systems - especially those containing lower specified processors. It is estimated that offloading the transformation and lighting calculations from the CPU will free up around 25% of the CPU power as things stand right now (i.e. running current game engines on current CPU's). nVidia's GPU can process around 10M fully lit and filtered triangles per second compared to around 3.5M/s for a 600Mhz Athlon and 3M/s for a PIII 600. The GPU has the architectural capability of processing 15M triangles/s although this will not be fully realised until the release of the 0.18 micron NV15.
The specifications for this chipset include the 10M triangles/sec GPU, a 480Mtexel fill rate and 256bit 4 pixel pipeline (480 million single textured, bilinear filtered pixels per second - 4 pixels/clock with a clock speed of 120Mhz), support for 8 hardware lights, texture compression, projective textures, a 350Mhz RAMDAC, AGP 4X support, support for up to 128Mb of memory (initially 166Mhz SDRAM but later 150/300Mhz DDR SGRAM), impressive HDTV video playback facilities and support for cubic environment bumpmapping. Cubic Environmental bumpmapping, supported by DX7 and OpenGL, will provide the most realistic bumpmapping currently available on a consumer card, enhancing the realism of reflections and lighting effects.
Early testing suggests that this card will be an excellent performer, especially for OpenGL and DX7 games which can utilise the onboard GPU. Quake 3 timedemos are around 40% faster than any other card yet tested (this does not include 3dfx's Napalm) with very early drivers - this percentage is sure to improve as the drivers are optimised. The image quality is also said to be excellent - better than the TNT2.
Boards that have been announced so far include Creative Lab's GeForce Annihilator ($299, 3/10/99 estimated shipping date) and the Guillemot Maxi Gamer Prophet ($249.99, 17/10/99 estimated shipping date). Boards are likely to be available in 32Mb and 64Mb configurations.
Dreamcast has its UK launch on October 14th.
Pentium III (Coppermine) was released on October 25th in speeds of 533/133, 600/100, 600/133, 650/100, 667/133, 700/100 and 733/133Mhz (Core/FSB speed). The Coppermine core is the 0.18micron successor to the Pentium III's Katmai core, featuring support for a 133Mhz FSB and 256Kb of on-die L2 cache running at full clock speed. The L2 cache is particularly impressive, having a 256bit 6 cycle latency path to the CPU which allows the transfer of 32 bytes every 2 clock cycles. This equates to a transfer rate of 11.7Gbytes/s for the 733Mhz model. As well as the improved cache architecture, memory transfer has also been improved by increasing the number of Fill buffers from 4 to 6, the Bus queue entries from 4 to 8 and the number of Writeback buffers from 1 to 4. The die shrink and the conversion to 256Kb full clock L2, along with the other architectural improvements, should result in a slight speed advantage over a similarly clocked 0.25micron Pentium III, although Coppermine will not threaten AMD's Athlon on a clock-for-clock basis.
Pentium III (Coppermine) for Socket 370 was released on October 25th at 500 and 550Mhz with a 100Mhz front side bus. Apart from its form factor and lower clock speed, the Socket 370 Pentium III will be identical to its Slot 1 brother.
Pentium III Xeon (Cascades) at 667, 700 and 733Mhz was released on October 25th. This processor is is based on the 0.18 micron Cascades core, a cheaper version of the Pentium III Xeon although it is still targeted at the Server and Workstation markets. Features include a 512Kb on-die full speed L2 cache, 133Mhz FSB and Pentium III Streaming SIMD instructions.
Pentium III Mobile (Coppermine) processors was released on October 25th at 450 and 500Mhz with a 100Mhz front side bus. These processors are not expected to include the new Geyserville power saving technology.
i840 chipset, also known as Carmel was released on October 25th. This chipset is essentially an i820 for servers, and is intended to replace chipsets such as the 440GX. Like the i820, the i840 will have support for AGP 4X with AGP Pro 50, for high power consumption AGP cards, ATA-66, 64bit PCI (66Mhz), a 133Mhz Front side bus, and support for PC100 SDRAM along with PC600 and PC800 RDRAM (not PC700). In addition the i840 will contain Quad processor support, 64bit PCI, 8Gb memory support and Dual RDRAM (doubling bandwidth) and MRH-S (4 way Interleaving of SDRAM) support to increase memory bandwidth. See the Tips page for a comparison of Intel's chipsets. It should be noted that SDRAM support has since been dropped for the i840 due to problems with the MRH-S.
Intel Price cuts occurred on October 25th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
AMD Price cuts occurred on October 25th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
Windows NT 4 Service Pack 6 was released on October 27th. This release includes more than 125 bugs including remote access memory leakages, DNS problems encountered on startup and a known blue-screen problem. There are also three Y2K bug fixes, downloadable separately from www.microsoft.com/technet/year2k/.
11/99
i820 chipset was released on November 15th after significant delays (it was scheduled for release on September 27th but was delayed due to problems with its Rambus memory architecture). This chipset is intended to replace the ageing 440BX chipset used on current Pentium II/III motherboards and is designed to complement the Pentium III coppermine core. Features of this chipset include support for AGP 4X and ATA-66, a 133Mhz Front side bus, PC100 SDRAM and Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) RIMM support. Unlike the BX chipset, the i820 comes in two varieties, a uniprocessor version (82820) and a dual processor version for SMP operation (82820DP). RDRAM is likely to appear in a number of speed grades due to manufacturing yield problems - PC600 (300Mhz), PC700 (356Mhz) and PC800(400Mhz). Note that RDRAM can transfer data over both the rising and falling edges of the clock. See the Tips page for a comparison of Intel's chipsets. It should be noted that SDRAM support has since been dropped for the i820 due to problems with the MTH.
Windows 2000 RC3 was released on November 15th. This release does not differ significantly from Windows 2000 RC2 aside from an updated driver base and bug fixes.
Internet Explorer 5.01 was released on November 18th. Features of this release include an improved FTP interface, an IE4 compatibility mode, improved Autocomplete and a Windows Radio toolbar for streaming radio playback . IE5.01 also improves IE5's encryption abilities, with support for DES and a standard encryption strength of 56bit (previously 40bit). Microsoft Wallet is no longer included with IE5.01 and support for Microsoft Chat 2.5 is being dropped.
S3 Savage 2000, previously known by the codename GX4, is S3's next generation Graphics accelerator and became generally available in Mid-November. The first board to make use of the chipset is Diamond Viper 2, which was officially released in Late October. Like the GeForce 256, the Savage 2000 will include hardware accelerated transformation and lighting, which will allow games with higher polygon counts and reduce the load on the processor substantially. To make use of the T&L engine applications must make use of the relevant OpenGL or DirectX 7 calls, so older software that didn't make use of DirectX's geometry system will not benefit (the geometry system in previous versions of DirectX was not particularly optimised so the majority of older applications used their own geometry engine).
The specifications for this chipset include a core clock of 125Mhz and a memory clock of 155Mhz (Revision 1B. Revision 1A had a memory clock of 143Mhz). The Savage 2000+, due for release early next year, will be raise the clock speed of the part to nearer 200Mhz. The chipset will be based on a 0.18 micron process and have support for 8 hardware lights, S3TC texture compression, a 350Mhz RAMDAC, AGP 4X, support for up to 64Mb of memory (including DDR SDRAM), good DVD/MPEG2 decoding facilities, support for embossed and environment mapped bumpmapping, and full screen Anti-aliasing.
Comparing the specs to the GeForce 256 we can see that they offer very similar features. The clock speed is slightly faster than the GeForce and the Savage 2000 is also able to perform a single pass quad texturing operation, unlike the GeForce 256. The disadvantages of this architecture over the GeForce 256 are a 128bit bus architecture (compared to 256bit), support for 64Mb (as opposed to 128Mb) and hardware environment mapped bumpmapping compared to the superior cubic environment bumpmapping of the GeForce 256. The geometry engine of the Savage 2000 is also less powerful than that of the GeForce 256 - the Savage 2000 has 11 million transistors as opposed to the 23 million of GeForce. The lower transistor count combined with the 0.18 micron process does allow the Savage 2000 to be clocked higher than GeForce and hence gives it a slight fill rate advantage. Never the less, initial tests show that the real world performance of this part is not quite as good as its competitor. Quake 3 scores, which utilise the 3D geometry engine of the Savage 2000, place the 125/155Mhz Viper II between the TNT2 Ultra and GeForce 256. Low resolutions with low quality settings tend to produce frame rates towards those of the TNT2 Ultra whilst high resolutions and high quality settings give scores more akin to the GeForce.
The 32Mb Savage 2000 based Viper II is to retail for around $150-$175. The 64Mb Viper II LE was scheduled to be released for around $270 although the recent DRAM price rises suggest that few if any 64Mb boards will be released.
Windows Millennium Beta 2 was released on November 24th. This release sees the introduction of system file protection, digital media management features, an upgrade for internet connection sharing and universal plug and play support. See the final product entry in the Roadmap for additional information on Windows Millennium.
Windows NT 4 Service Pack 6a was released on November 24th, along with Windows NT4 Terminal Server Service Pack 5. Service Pack 6a is a re-release of SP6 which incorporates the Winsock hotfix released last week.
AMD Athlon 750 was released on November 29th. This CPU contains AMD's new K75 core, the 0.18 micron version of the K7 core found on the lower clocked Athlons. The Athlon 750 contains a 2/5 L2 cache clock multiplier as opposed to the 1/2 clock multiplier found in previous Athlons.
AMD K6-2 533 was released on November 29th on a 0.25 micron process.
12/99
Internet Explorer 5.5 Platform Preview was released on December 2nd. Features include an enhanced HTML engine, allowing custom DHTML links, additional cascading style sheets, ViewLink technology which allows the creation of custom controls without ActiveX, and HTML+TIME for timing and media synchronisation. Other new features include a Print Preview feature, vertical text support, better customisation of user interface controls and HTML based activity centers, similar to those originally planned for Windows Millennium.
nVidia GeForce 256 DDR cards featuring 256bit DDR SGRAM started shipping on December 10th, and became available in the UK on December 15th. Despite having a lower memory clock of 150Mhz, Double Data Rate cards have an effective clock speed of 300Mhz due to their ability to transfer twice as much data per clock cycle than their Single Data Rate cousins. See the GeForce 256 Roadmap entry for additional information.
Intel Price cuts are due on December 12th. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
Windows 2000 final was released to manufacturing on December 15th. Note that there will be some delay before the product is available in the shops - the shipping date is February 17th. Windows 2000 will be available in Professional, Server and Advanced Server initially, with the Datacentre version being released some months later.
Netscape Communicator 5 Alpha was released on December 15th.
Pentium III 800 & 750 were released on December 20th, although supplies will be limited until Q1 2000. See the CPU Prices page for additional information.
DirectX 7.0a was released on December 20th. DirectX 7.0a is identical to DirectX 7.0 aside from updated DirectInput drivers.
