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Where Oh Where Is The Pentium 4?
Othello writes: "Sharky managed to dig up some insider info on why we aren't going to see the Pentium 4 this month. There are chipset problems with ICH2 that are causing the delay. The processor should be out around week 48, they say, which is late November or early December."
HardOCP had a link on their page yesterday pointing to TurboTech and an pretty damaging, but generally truthful, editorial... If you are an Intel fan, well, skip this message :)
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http://www. tur botech.ch/articles2000/001001-intels_darkening-01
HardOCP quoted this part, which is a pretty good one:
September 2000 - Intel's blackest month in countless years. Following the official withdrawal of the 1.13 GHz PIII in the last days of August, in the wake of this face-loss it also became pretty obvious that Intel will have to ditch the grandiose plans of breathing new life into the dying P6 core with a 200 MHz FSB, a 0.13 micron process, and larger on-die L2 caches. It seems the Coppermine core (the last and most advanced modification of the half a decade old P6 core, introduced in the Pentium Pro 150 MHz in the mid-90s) simply won't be able to go much further.
It certainly appears that AMD is poised to overtake Intel in the PC arena. IMHO, Intel is coasting on their reputation, fab capacity, and product line breadth, at the moment. They are not the CPU performance or value leaders. The introduction of Mustang and Athlon SMP around the end of this year will chip at Intel's last stronghold.
But will it matter?
We speak of the post-PC era. I don't expect to see the PC go away. I'd rather expect it to look more like the end of the mainframe era of a decade or two ago. The mainframes didn't go away, they even kept growing their market. But the wild growth was in the PCs.
Now in the post-PC era, expect to see the PC market growing, just not wildly. Knowing exactly what will be the wild growth area is what will make some people VERY rich.
But Intel's product breadth, particularly ownership of the StrongARM, is going to help them more than AMD's CPU leadership will. IMHO, AMD may well have won a Pyhrric (sp?) victory. The big question will be how they are poised to play in the post-PC era.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
There is also a story at the Register about the current exec shuffle that Intel is doing related to the P4. Sounds more and more like panic to me given its recent set of fiascos...
Oh where, oh where is the Pentium 4?
Oh where, oh where has it been? This song will turn me to a Karma Whore And AC's will rip out my spleen!"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The only thing that will save the P4 at this point is a huge marketing blitz by Intel. And even that sometimes fizzles (remember the "Enhanced for Pentium 3" web sites? The only one around I've seen is intel.com).
Now, if only Motorola/Apple finally get off their asses and make the high-clock speed G4s it's capable of. Dual CPU is tre-cool, but only if the OS fully supports it, and OSX won't be out in full release for a while.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
harnessing the complexity of it all.
What would Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Ted Hoff and Federico Fagin do?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I think the time for the NVidia DDR chipset is NOW. Let's stop this half-assed hardware engineering and pre-alpha lithography which the Intel staff is undertaking.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer