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Intel Roadmap
Karl "Kielbasa" Wise sent us an excellent article that showed up on Sharkyextreme detailing Intel's CPU stuffs planned out for future. RDRAM, Socket 370, and other tidbits.
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> If so, there are going to be a lot of 1GHz Athlon processors sitting on the store shelves months ahead of the Intel shipments.
I don't know what the OEMs have access to, but I've been watching pricewatch.com ever since Intel and AMD fell over themselves trying to be the first to announce a 1GHz chip.
Intel is getting stomped. Sometime in the last 24 hours a link for Intel 866MHz machines showed up at the site; right now there are now five entries for PIII 866s ($975-$1035) and none for Xeon 866s.
Meanwhile, there has been a single listing for an Athlon 1GHz chip ($1399) for 2-3 weeks, there is now a single listing for an Athlon 950 ($985), and there are two listings for A900s ($885, $986) and about 30 for A850s ($718-859).
Without boring you with the details, I can add that there is a similar mismatch between price and availability for 800MHz chips from the two makers.
It looks to me that Intel is suffering a strategic rout in the high-end x86 chip market.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Intel makes good products, sure. But lets face it, they've been gouging customers for years. It's harder IMO to run a monopoly on the hardware side than the software side for reasons I won't mention.
:)
So when someone comes along with a decent, similar product, they can undercut your margins significantly. Thats called competition. So instead of taking the hit from AMD and riding it out, they try to pull a fast one on the entire computer world, and use this RDRAM fiasco, FUD marketing, and strong-arming their customers (well, thats conspiracy ala tom's hardware, but I would expect nothing less from a large corporation) to keep their near monopoly-status. It most likely won't work.
Face it, the shareholders get really pissed when profit levels drop. Maintaining their previous profit margins for the long term is near impossible. Today the only way to do it is with proprietary products like RDRAM, and similarly with their chip packaging and even MMX.
So instead of intel dealing with it properly, they shoot themselves in the foot. Capitalism works once in a while, I guess
Since I mentioned RDRAM, what is the deal with this article? It looks like marketing by intel. Every review I've seen of RDRAM either trashes it or gives it marginally better rankings than SDRAM, but even then the price difference doesn't make it worth it. Yet this site thinks its great, and states that SDRAM won't be able to keep up. Huh? DDR SDRAM is loooking pretty damn good to me. I don't want the extra latency from RDRAM anyway. What a load of FUD.
Thank you, my rant is finished.
Get our asses beat by AMD time and time again
Allow Transmeta to take over the mobile market
Pump billions of dollars into technology that we will never get to work
Keep talking about Merced or any 64-bit processor but never do anything with it
Sue/Get Sued by anyone with a heartbeat (also Microsoft! not sure if they have a heartbeat..)
Fake profit earnings after getting killed by AMD/Transmeta/Cyrix
Make a "KILLER" motherboard with modem/sound/video built-in!
Sabotage future Celeron-type chips from being overclocked or SMP'd
Make more bogus roadmaps
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) - AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
Who would want to upgrade just part of their system? By the time I start thinking about a new CPU, everything else in the case is old also. It's not just CPUs that need upgrading, it's RAM, Disk, Cache, DVD, etc.
For example, my last computer (When I bought it), had a Whopping 40 megs of ram, and a 1X cd, and a Huge 1.3 Gig hard drive.
The next computer I bought had a PIII-650, 13 Gig Drive, DVD, and 128 Megs of RAM. Not quite as cool (real-time adjusted), but I'm married with 3 kids now. None the less, I expect this box to get through the next 3-4 years before I start lusting after that P-5-2000 with a Gig of Ram and a 500 Gig Hard Drive.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
This article seems to be out of date on the day it's published. Or maybe this is subtler than it appears. For example:
Overall CPU speeds will increase as the year goes forward. No surprise there. 1GHz Pentium IIIs may hit the after market in late Q3 or Q4 2000. At this time, it does not look like Pentium III CPU speeds will go over 1GHz this year, or possibly ever, though Intel assures us that there is still performance headroom in the Coppermine design.
Now is this information pertaining to on-the-shelf availability of the 1GHz PIII's? If so, there are going to be a lot of 1GHz Athlon processors sitting on the store shelves months ahead of the Intel shipments. And if the news that the 1GHz PIII is all that we will see this year, then I suspect that AMD may have more of a march on Intel than we thought. Of course, Intel may well be banking more heavily on Willamette getting out earlier than planned to make up for the shortfall, in which case it will be interesting to see how AMD develop the Athlon line with its new faster caches in order to keep parity.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Why yields on Rambus have indeed gotten better, it is going to be a loooooooong time before they are reasonable. You can test the parts for basic function ok, but when you have to test the full 128 Meg module for speed, you have to have the whole puppy assembled with heat sink cement and all. One slow chip and the whole thing is slow, and you CAN'T tell beforehand, and you can't take it apart to replace that one part either. Gotta sell it as slow. Kingston reports yields of 50%, others as low as 10% for the full speed units. With crappy yields like that, the price is not comming down soon, if at all, on the high speed (and wasn't that why you wanted it in the first place?) units. Somehow, I think that with the price of double clock, folks will use that in their 820 chipsets. Indeed, there are some tests that have shown that Rambus actually UNDEPERFORMS a GX chipset pushed to 133. I don't own or short it, but be careful if you want to buy stock in that dog, sharkyextreme or no... Please remember that every once in a while Intel backs a real loser. Remember Bubble memory... My understanding is that Intel is going through the motions, but is going to keep their options open wrt Rambus.
Q3 00: Release faster processor. Trumpet it as 'great for internet'. Maybe call it the iCPU? Leave prices for current CPUs untouched, continue to make 50MHz improvements cost $200 over previous models.
Q4 00: AMD is at it again. Squish them, and pay off the FTC. Athlon really heating up. Engage in mudslinging campaign. Switch to smaller micron process to decrease die size. Ignore Transmeta's protests that their CPU has lower power consumption. Power is good. Suck lots of it.
Q1 01: Caught modifying CPU to make SPECint run faster. Damn. Use PIII ID feature to track down creators of SPECint and issue corrective measures. e-commerce is starting to wind down, start investing in hardware companies again.
Q2 01: Bunny suits aren't having the impact we want in the market. Find a pop rock band and rip off a new song - show competitor's CPU on fire.
Q3 01: Get posted to slashdot. Site crashes. Rob Malda mysteriously disappears
Q4 01: Can't do any marketing, Microsoft trial finally ended and DOJ needs a reason to keep their budget up. License out some worthless tech to competitors, later sue them for contract violations.
Q4 02: New SPECint benchmarks show our chips as fourteen times faster than the competition.
Q1 03: Another revolutionary new processor is created. Trumpet it as being Windows 2001 compatible (which was just released last week).
Q2 03: Bah, this far out, who the hell cares what we're planning on doing?
... and why it's not that great after all. At Tom's Hardware .
Intel make great chips. There, I said it. They also have a history of making good decisions. So why are they acting like a rabbit caught in the headlights?
For a long time Intel had the highest clock speed chips on the market. Their FPU kicked any part of the anatomy you care to sit on. Their chipsets were awesome. They drove Cyrix into a *very* small corner.
Then, AMD finally gets it's act together with the Athlon. Athlon is faster/better/cheaper (pick two:) than the Pentium 3. And Intel seem to go to pieces. This is not cause and effect, but I honestly believe that losing bragging rights to AMD has caused Intel to mismanage a series of problems that would have been merely embarrasing.
The Camino chipset had/has problems. Merced is so late it may be entirely overtaken by Willamette. Etcetera (it's not a long list of problems, but they seem to be screwing them up so badly I thought I'd say 'etcetera')
Then AMD beat them to the punch with a 1GHz processor. That must have hurt. Even though the Athlon was running it's cache at 1/3 clock rate, AMD got there first. By all of two days.
The (pass me another bucket of 'allegedly's) rumour is that Intel are having difficulty supplying demand for their faster chips (850MHz+), while AMD are happy to ship by the truckful. (More 'allegedly's please...) Other rumours say that some of Intel's second-tier customers are abandoning their Intel loyalty points and buying Athlons just so thay can ship some boxes. Fast boxes. They would love to buy from Intel, but their customers want the boxes today.
And Intel are *still* making stupid decisions. Backing RDRAM is daft. Nobody makes it in serious volume, it's five times more expensive than 'conventional' RAM, and it's proprietry. You can't make it without a licence from Rambus (Who don't have any fabs themselves). And it is at best marginally faster, and at worst astonishingly slower, than SDRAM.
To end the rant: Intel is a great company with great products. But Andy Grove should go and read his own book.