Article : "PCs and Servers in 2001: A Gigahertz Odyssey"
at
electronicnews.com
About Intel and AMD :
To those jaded souls among us who grew up alongside the computer industry, it's still exciting to see 1.5GHz microprocessors. Intel Corp.'s seventh-generation processor core, the Pentium 4, should make great strides in 2001 thanks to SSE2, which breaks through the limitations of x87 floating point and the deeply pipelined microarchitecture, which should reach 2GHz in the third quarter. Performance is not synonymous with clock speed, but there's no denying the appeal of big, round numbers.
Overall, 2001 will be a transition year for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel (nasdaq: INTC). As the Pentium 4 starts to replace the Pentium III in the performance desktop market, the P4 will also enter the workstation/server market midyear with a version named Foster. The venerable P6 architecture used in the PIII will begin another transition, moving to 0.13 micron in a processor code-named Tualatin. By then, the P6 architecture, first introduced in 1995 in 0.5 micron as the PentiumPro, will have undergone four process shrinks in six years, a record for Intel. The Pentium III will continue to be a mainstay in Intel's processor lineup throughout 2001 and will also remain the premier mobile processor through the year.
Intel's investment in a new 64-bit architecture, IA-64, and its first implementation, Itanium, will continue to gain acceptance, thanks to Intel's marketing muscle. We will not have a clear picture of the IA-64's performance potential until McKinley, the second-generation IA-64 processor, begins to sample in the fourth quarter. In the meantime, Itanium will ramp slowly and will gradually transition from evaluation to production status. Itanium is a very strategic program for Intel and Hewlett-Packard Co. as their 64-bit roadmap and professional reputations depend on Itanium becoming a success.
Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), the perennial No. 2 in the PC processor arena, made amazing progress in 2000 and should, based on the success of Athlon, continue to do well in 2001. AMD (nyse: AMD) held the speed and performance lead after Thunderbird, the integrated cache version of Athlon, shipped in the second quarter 2000. In 2001 Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD will lose the clock-speed crown to Intel's P4, but Athlon will continue to offer competitive performance on applications that have not been optimized for SSE2. In the first quarter of 2001, AMD will introduce a new version of Athlon, presently called Palomino. Palomino will address one of Athlon's weaknesses: power consumption. Athlon is a very power-hungry processor; even in 0.18 micron it consumes up to 38A at 1.75V with a maximum thermal power of 66W at 1.2GHz—attributes not appropriate for a mobile processor. Palomino will reduce power consumption and feature PowerNow, AMD's power management technology first introduced on the AMD-K6-2+ processors. In the second quarter, AMD will introduce Morgan, a value version of Palomino. AMD likely won't be in a position to retake the clock-speed crown until 2002.
The main challenges for AMD in 2001 relate more to marketing than technology. AMD is well established in the consumer PC market, but has yet to make headway in the commercial, workstation and server markets. The reason is a lack of multiprocessor support, despite the fact that the EV6 bus on which Athlon's bus is based is highly optimized for multiprocessor support. The first step to multiprocessor support is the 760MP dual-processor chipset, which AMD first demonstrated at the Microprocessor Forum 2000 in October. Unfortunately, systems using the 760MP will not ship until the second quarter. AMD has had difficulty finding a partner to bring out a chipset to support four- or eight-way systems and AMD itself will not have a solution for four-way or greater processing systems until the Sledgehammer processor ships in the second quarter. Sledgehammer, with its x86-64 architecture, is AMD's answer to Intel's Itanium.
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