SCUMbria & Intel Investors - More information on Intel's Whitney Chip Set and Graphics Performance.
Also : "Intel will announce the i752 graphics chip tomorrow."
This is the stand-alone version of the Portola Graphics Processor which will be mounted on a "traditional" AGP card. We should start seeing perfromance specs on this real soon.
Paul
{=================================}
Intel's new "Whitney" chipset could shave $100 off PC price
By Mark Hachman,
Electronic Buyers' News Apr 26, 1999 (2:30 PM)
URL: ebnews.com
Today, Intel Corp. formally introduced the Intel 810 or "Whitney" integrated PC graphics chipset, a product that offers a complex mix of cost and feature tradeoffs. Intel has designed the Intel 810 with an eye towards lowering cost by combining discrete components onto individual chips. According to Paul Otellini, executive vice-president and general manager of Intel's Architecture Business Group, Intel will begin to add these functions onto the microprocessor next year.
"We continue to drive value while taking costs out of the platform going forward," Otellini said.
By integrating the next-generation i752 graphics core together with software-based audio and communications capabilities, Intel has saved motherboard OEMs about $25, a 20% savings versus the cost of discrete components, Otellini said. Since discrete vendors would also mark up their chips to turn a profit, the 810 should knock off $50 to $100 off the price of a PC, he added.
Intel will announce the i752 graphics chip tomorrow.
But the low cost comes with a price: the inability to upgrade to new graphics chips. Because the chipset uses an internal graphics bus, no external graphics connection was added, said Ron Peck, marketing manager for the desktop products group at Intel.
According to Joe Van De Water, desktop chipset marketing manager for Intel, the Intel 810 will generate performance equivalent to a 300 score on the 3DWinBench '99 test suite, running at 1064x768 resolution, at 16-bit color depths. Two-dimensional performance generates a 138 score on the 2DWinBench benchmark.
The 810 is designed to work with Intel's Celeron chips, also being slimmed down to reduce costs. Intel's new 466-MHz Celeron, introduced last week, will forego Intel's Single-Edge Processor Package (SEPP), instead shipping only in a plastic PGA, as previously reported. In 1,000-unit lots, the 466-MHz Celeron will be sold for $169.
While the chipset combines several functions onto one chip, the days of Intel's two-chip chipset may be over. According to Peck, the 810 adds a "firmware hub," a third chip that stores the BIOS software of both the core logic and graphics cores. The hub also includes a random number generator for security algorithms.
To improve a PC's performance, Intel added a faster, dedicated 266 Mbyte/s connection between the north and south bridges, rather than the 133 Mbyte/s PCI bus previously used, Peck added.
But the processor bus speed of the Intel 810 and the Celeron platform will remain at 66 MHz for the rest of 1999, Otellini said. Trying to explain this "megahertz-ness" of the PC was just too complicated for the low-cost segment, especially in the retail market, he said.
As expected, three versions of the 810 were introduced, two using "dynamic video memory" to allocate a PC's system memory for graphics use. The graphics core requests memory in much the same way software does, Peck said, so there is no upper limit on how much it may use.
Both the Intel 810 and 810-L use this dynamic video memory, although the "-L" version only allows 2 PCI slots to be used and interfaces to a slower ATA-33 storage interface rather than the faster ATA-66 connection used by the Intel 810. A third "810DC100" version supports discrete PC100 DRAM. The dedicated frame buffer increases the chipset's 2D and 3D benchmark scores to 140 and 384 using the 2DWinBench and 3DWinBench tests, respectively, Intel's Van De Winter said.
The Intel 810, 810-L and 810DC100 will be priced at $29.50, $25.50 and $32, respectively.
|
