ITotals - December `2002
ProcessorsSumming up the events of the past year's last month, let me take the liberty to start the narration not with the pair of atlantes carrying the burden of the whole x86 market on their shoulders but with the VIA since in the market terms the company is completing the year in quite high spirits. As far as VIA is concerned, it's worth starting with Intel Celeron of course.
C3, with its slightly lower price and far much lower performance has hardly been regarded a serious contender to Celeron up till now, but the news of Intel's intention to cease producing the last of the Socket-370, Celeron 1.4 GHz, (the last shipments of the box version are scheduled for no later than 11 July, with the last OEM shipments to be effected before 12 December 2003) is about to break the spirit of PC assemblers (at least in Russia): to date they don't see other alternatives to Celerons as "the cheapest PCs ever" that have been popular with most value users - the Socket-370 platform is still holding much favor in this sector.
This time, they seem to be forced to turn to another alternative - the C3 which used to go unnoticed but now you've got no other choice than turn your eyes to that. VIA seems to cause joy rather than grief to them, at least recently: C3 is indeed increasing its turnover and doubled the sales volume for November alone; the 1GHz version of the processor saw the light in Tokyo early in December, which is more than enough for the Low-end sector.
Apart from the announced demise for Celeron 1.4 GHz, Intel didn't bring any other news in December. Mind you, why and where should it come from? All what could be shot out was released still in the late third or early fourth quarter, so last month the company had nothing to do but reap the fruits: as per Intel's forecasts, its sales volumes for the fourth quarter should surpass all expectations and probably exceed the $6.5-6.9 bln target by $100-500 mln.
Anyway, don't think that only Intel is doing well because of its victories over AMD. The latter is expecting to gain $700 mln of sales volumes in the fourth quarter. Sure, that's much lower than Intel's, but it's 35% higher than in the previous quarter! As a result, although AMD is unlikely to reach profitability, nevertheless it will get as close as possible to the make-out boundary.
And it did that - no doubt. Unlike Intel, it did that in December as well. Mind you, compared to other news, the release of Athlon MP 2400+ is not so big deal to get excited about, but nevertheless.. Keep in mind that in line with the release of this processor AMD reduced prices for MP 2000+ and 2200+ by $153 and $208, respectively. Also, rumors had it 2400+ would be the last of the Athlon MP line using the 266MHz system bus and 2600+ the first to use the FSB333.
Athlon MP 2400+ is based on the 0.13 mk process technology like all the recent AMD processors. Moreover, the company is still migrating older and slower models onto the technology as well. For instance, on 11 December AMD migrated the XP 1700+ and 1800+ into the 0.13 mk process technology, which will allow reducing the company losses, and - you never know - maybe retrieving the positive dynamics in the second-third quarter of 2003. In fact, AMD is not confining itself to low-end models - in the middle of the month Athlon XP 2700+ hit the retail shelves in Japan, with first restricted shipments of Athlon XP 2800+ started simultaneously.
There are some other interesting news items regarding the mid-end Athlon processors, although they don't quite relate to real products or even their announcements. It is a question of first test results on Athlon XP 2500+ Barton (0.13 mk, FSB 333, and 512K L2 cache). In fact, they all proved quite predictable - until the release of Athlon 64 due to the evident and vivid superiority, AMD has gained some stock in both the performance (the 512K L2 cache is off jokes) and the clock speed (mostly due to the raised system bus speed, so the performance boost is not likely to be that essential): for now, no higher than 2800+ is seen on the horizon, although no earlier than in the second quarter.
As for the Athlon 64, remember that fresh results of its tests appeared in December - this time it was an evaluation unit running at 1.2 GHz clock speed. Well, the results are somehow encouraging. That evaluation unit exhibited performance approximately the same as that for 2.2 GHz Pentium4 on average (keep in mind its 1MB L2 cache versus 512K in the Pentium 4). By the time the Athlon 64 is factually released, Intel is expected to offer 3.4 GHz, therefore, to stay competitive, this AMD's new offspring has got to offer a clock speed starting at 1.7 GHz at least, so things are not that bad and the expected clock speed is going to be around 2 GHz on the date of its release.
Since the 'on-paper announcement' of the families is likely to take place somewhere in March-April (presumably, at CeBIT), the dates of factual release are getting more certain, and these processors won't appear in mass quantities earlier than the second half of the summer. That's when AMD is going to do much better in terms of finances especially in view of the fact that the Opteron is being earnestly positioned as a "Xeon killer" and AMD seems to have some serious grounds for that. 64-bit addressing, integrated DDR controller, > 1MB cache sound impressive. This results in a solution no weaker than Xeon plus the competitive price AMD has always been riding high at. What really matters is that AMD has to do much to conquer the market - the Athlon MP does not seem to have gained much success.
In any case, this year the Opteron should increase from 1.4 up to 2.6 GHz and will be quite on par with Xeon at performance, especially if AMD does implement its response to the HyperThreading in the renewed cores of further lines. And AMD really is capable of doing that - at least the respective patents of its own are there and the new K9 line seems to have something for that already planned. Again, if AMD, as it promises, has enough force to overcome the 0.09 mk process technology this year, then Opteron will have every chance to measure swords with Xeon. However, let's be realistical about it - AMD is unlikely to cope with the 0.09 mk process earlier than the year 2004.
Mind you, it's not only the 'Intel vs AMD' confrontation that rules the PC manufacturers market. This market is also represented by the dual-processor PowerMac driven by the PowerPC G4 even though it features merely 1.25 GHz and lags well behind both Athlon MP and Pentium4 systems, let alone Xeon systems. There is also the Alpha EV7 promised for the coming January, the last but one in this family offering 1.2 GHz and integrated dual-channel RDRAM controller. And last but not least - the IBM PowerPC 970, scheduled for the second half of this year, which is in fact a cut-down version of the Power4 and aimed at the desktop end of the market: it offers 64-bit, >1.8 GHz clock speed, multivector multithreaded command execution. This is really going to be a good chance for the Apple, although it'd be better off migrating to the x86 processors.
 |
Top Stories: |
 |
 |
|
MoBo:
| |
|
|
VGA Card:
|
|
|
|
CPU & Memory:
|
|
