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Intel Cancels its Timna chip
zensonic noted that Intel has announced that they are
cancelling the Tinma chip. It was an integrated chip that would be used in low end systems... they cited market demand and design problems as the reason.
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The problem with Timna was not with Timna--it was with RAMBUS. Timna itself has been ready for over 6 months--the problem was that this "low end" processor was designed only to use Rambus memory. Timna wasn't late, the "bridge" chip was late. Intel made the mistake of assuming that Rambus would be the de facto standard and very plentiful by now...
Bizarre. My first post vanished. That's some serious bad karma!
As I may have mentioned, my first thought when I read "Tinma Cancelled" was "Duron". Intel's roadmap has some serious potholes in it, after recalling PIII's, push back of the P4, supply problems and losing customers to AMD. AMD folks must be heading down to the Tied House (in DT SJ) to get plowed.
I know a number of people within Intel who say expense practices are loose and Intel is hemmoraging large amounts of cash on sloppy management and indecision. I'm expecting after this week there will be some shakeup and possibly some restructuring. This many mis-steps usually doesn't go unrewarded.
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Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Faceintel.com
The poster's contention was that Intel is working its engineers to the bone, and under a demeaning work environment, and this is why Intel is falling behind - their top talent is leaving for AMD and Texas Instruments (TI) en masse as a result of management. This, the author contended, was the real reason for Intel's recent failures - they've pushed their engineers too far.
I doubt this is a conspiracy, but I'm reposting this anyway, as the comment deserves to be seen, as does the site.
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Seeing a chip like this dropped is disturbing. Two and a half years ago, I bought a Pentium II 333. At the time, it was the top of the line. The previous machine I owned was sixty some odd megahertz, which I used for software development and running a buziness, so 333 MHz seemed like lightning. I still think it's a smoking system. I use it for development, including coding in what are traditionally seen is heavy-duty processor intensive languages like Lisp. That same machine is also used for 3D modeling. The usual advice is "buy the fastest machine you can get if you are going to 3D work," and that's what I did. Everything I do on that machine is snappy. I played Unreal on it, when it was first released, in software rendering mode--because I didn't have a Glide card--and had great fun with it. I have no speed complaints whatsoever. I'm not like some guy trying to justify that this Commodore 64 is still useful; I honestly think my PC is very fast.
Since I bought my machine, the bus speed jumped from 66 to 100 to 133 MHz. Processor speed went to 350, 400, 450, until the low end machine you can get from mail order catalogs is around 633. High end close to twice that. The Pentium III and Athlon became available, with better throughput and more cache. At the same time, video cards progressed from the then-new Voodoo 2 to the TNT, TNT 2, Rage 128, Matrox G400, GeForce, and GeForce 2. Take a low end machine out of all these specs, say a 600 MHz machine with a 100 MHz bus and a TNT 2. That's at least twice the performance of my machine. And in all honesty, I don't know what to do with all the power of my current set-up.
These low-end chips that get kicked around, like those from Transmeta, are still more powerful than what I currently have. And yet the constant wisdom that is spouted is "there's no market at the low end."
I cracked open my machine yesterday to add a new card, and it really struck me how much junk there is in the average PC. Mine must weight 30 pounds. There are a couple of fans, and two absolutely enormous heat sinks. It bothers me to see people tossing these out and buying new machines, just so they can surf the web, listen to MP3s, run Office, and play horribly broken game demos (that is, game demos that don't look like anyone gave a moment's thought to making them run fast on more than reasonable machines). Nobody cares about power consumption or form factor either, just so-called "performance." Even if you need a car battery to power a video card, some people don't care. "My bubble sort is too slow! I need an Athlon!" At some point, this has to stop. People don't realize how much they're being suckered here, which is surprising for the typical anti-corporate college student geek.