xbitlabs.com
Saturday, July 14, 2001
Desktop Tualatin Now in Retail [5:22 am] Rat
Those desktop Tualatin processors, which were showcased in Japan this week, as we have already told you, are now selling in Japanese retail hardware stores. In the meanwhile, you can find only 1.13GHz CPUs, while 1.2GHz are still available only as samples. These CPUs are sold in Intel boxes and are officially called Intel Pentium III 1.13AGHz. The letter "A" after 1.13 serves to distinguish Tualatin based Pentium III from Coppermine based ones. In other words, unlike server and mobile processors Intel decided not to think of any specific name for its desktop processors. No wonder, since the performance of desktop Tualatin processors with 256KB L2 cache is hardly any different from Pentium III Coppermine working at the same clock frequency. Note that desktop Tualatin CPUs do not officially support dual-processor configurations that is why there is a note on the box saying: "for uni-processor systems only". The newcomer is selling at a price a bit less than $300.
The fact that Tualatins are already retailing means that Intel decided to accelerate its roadmap and plane to move their announcement from the late summer to some time closer to now. As we know, on Monday Intel will be reducing the prices for some processors (Celeron family, elder Pentium III CPUs). So, the desktop Tualatin announcement may also take place at the same time. Anyway, we’ll see what comes...
Intel 845 Based Mainboards in Mid August [2:25 pm] Rat
Transcend sent us an official press release in which they reported the announcement of the new TS-ABD4 mainboard based on i845 chipset. According to the company, the board should start shipping in the middle of August.
The mainboard is designed in ATX form-factor, supports Socket478 Pentium 4 CPUs and is provided with 3 DIMM slots for the maximum of 3GB PC100/PC133 SDRAM. Besides, there are 5 PCI, 1 AGP 4x and 1 CNR slot. The board supports ATA/100 interface, features AC’97 sound, 4 USB ports, ATA/100 IDE RAID controller from Promise (optional) and integrated 10/100 Ethernet controller (optional). The board supports ezBIOS brand technology (with antivirus protection) and ezLOGO (allow setting your logo into the BIOS so that you could see it on the system boot-up).
The photo of this board is available here.
Well, there is about one month left before Socket478 CPUs and first Intel 845 based mainboards hit the streets. |
