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."

Comments

A great editorial about Intel's problems

[Hadean]

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 :)

http://www. tur botech.ch/articles2000/001001-intels_darkening-01. html

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.

Market positions of Intel and AMD in a post-PC era

[dpilot]

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.

Intel Has Also Shuffled P4 Execs

[HiyaPower]

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...

Couldn't this all be solved by ditching RDRAM?

[AFCArchvile]

Seriously, all of the major recent Intel chipset problems were with RDRAM. There's the infamous i820E problem with the third RDRAM chip not getting registered (which was after the initial, pre-RDRAM i820 went bust). And now this, when the ICH2 is coupled with the i850 and i860 MTHs, which use... starts with R, you know this...... RDRAM! Right!

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.