Email me Pentium II will enter the mobile marketplace in 1998 and will draw 8.6 watts in comparison to 9 watts for a Pentium 166 MMX. 17 Watts for standard Pentium II cartridge.
Basic PC will be a P6 running at 66MHZ external bus with no L2 cache in a Slot 1 form factor with a new chipset called the 440BPC. The 440BPC is a cost reduced 440LX, with pin out compatibility, available in April. This processor was called Covington. Intel has since announced a family name for their entry PC processor, Celeron. The remainder of this page will refer to the first of the Celeron family as Covington, it's original name. Covington is the same pin out as the current Pentium II however it's mechanicals are slightly different. Initial systems built with Covington will probably not be upgradable to Pentium II. Intel is working on a retaining mechanism that would support both allowing users to upgrade to Pentium II processors. The basic PC may well be the volume leader and will use 66MHZ SyncD ensuring 66MHZ SyncD will be here until the year 2000. Covington without an L2 cache will probably be slower than a Pentium based system with L2 cache (even though it may cost more!).
Next up in performance is called the Mendicino which will have an on chip 128KB L2 cache also running at 66MHZ still using the BPC chipset. The L2 will be on the actual processor chip rather than the processor module the way it is on the current Pentium II processors. This will also be a Celeron family processor aimed at the entry level.
The performance PC will use the soon to be announced 100MHZ slot 1 based 350, 400 and 450MHZ. The chipset has been referred to as the BX, and is expected to be called the 450Perf. L2 cache will still be 1/2 internal processor speed.
A follow on to the MMX instruction set called MMX-2 will be introduced in the Katmai processor.
Slot 2 will be introduced that will include a full speed L2 cache with cache sizes from 1/2MB, 1M or 2 MB! Slot 2 will allow multiple processors (beyond the Slot 1 limit of 2). The chipset will be called the 450SWS (server workstation). The Slot 2 processor is called Deschutes.
There was an interesting quote in Feb Byte magazine that helps to put this in perspective. "For years the standard computer magazine advice has been to buy the most powerful PC you can afford as protection against early obsolescence. That advice is now obsolete. So much new stuff is coming that early obsolescence, indeed instant obsolescence is inevitable. No amount of money you spend today will protect you against it. ... Each new software upgrade gradually turns their big, fast computer into a small slow computer."
Industry Status:
PC100 SDRAM availability.
PC100 Registered SDRAM availability.
RAMBUS availability.
A popular topic is that the memory subsystem has lagged the performance improvements of the CPU. In spite of this current benchmarks show that the 100MHZ SyncD improves the overall system performance by only 4% in comparison to 66MHZ! This is relatively easy to understand given that DRAM performance becomes an issue when you have a cache miss. Cache misses are estimated at around 10%. So the 50% improvement of 100MHZ Vs. 66MHZ is only seen 10% of the time yielding an overall system performance increment at best of 5%!
Server market place has cost and granularity options allowing them to use slower DRAM devices. Desktop and workstation are driving memory bandwidth improvements. Servers tend to lag the memory technology curve by as much as two years.
In the future Intel will ONLY support RIMMs as main memory. RIMMs are Rambus dIMMS. To allow a safety window during the change over to RIMMS and Rambus Intel are looking into a Sync RIMM using a conversion chip on the DIMM. No cost analysis of this has been done at this time.
RDRAM cost increment is 10-20% over SDRAM today. First RDRAM system/chipset will be available from Intel in 1999. Intel are investigating the possibility of offering SyncD RIMMs to allow a fall back should price/availability issues exist with RDRAM.
The FCC have added an open box test for motherboard suppliers. The preliminary version of the 100MHZ BX based system failed this test!
Double data rate SyncD will not be supported by Intel chipsets as main memory. DDR is a temporary solution to memory bandwidth increase that can be best compared to BEDO. With no Intel chipset support it will be relatively unsuccessful. Major driver is the small cost increase to the DRAM suppliers. Workstation success is possible given that they have their own chipsets. Graphics may also make use of DDR.
System File checker will check key DLLs needed for Windows and if they have been found to be corrupted you can reinstall just these corrupted DLLs.
Disk Cleanup will check your hard drive for temporary install files, temporary web files and other left around scraps and delete them intelligently.
The registry is now kept backed up automatically (5 backups are kept). A registry clean program is also included.
Code freeze date for NT 5.0 is October with GA expected in Dec 98. NT 5.0 is in Beta 1 and has proven to be unstable. Beta 2 is expected in April. Microsoft and Intel have recommended 64 MB of memory for NT 5.0 however will run on 32 MB.
In 1985 60 companies were making disk drives. Today only 12 companies remain. The latest to bow out is Micropolis.
At last a use for those USB ports ... Connectix has
come out with a gadget called Quickclip which
allows you to connect your camcorder
and do full motion video capture or still capture.
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