Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/778
Computex 2001 Day 1 - Live Coverage
by Anand Shimpi & Mike Andrawes on June 3, 2001 11:51 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Introduction
The show is just getting started, but we've already seen enough to give you
guys a bit of brief live coverage, as well as some information on what to expect
from the rest of the show.
Over the course of this week we will be bringing you even more live coverage,
including full reviews of some of the products being introduced at this year's
Computex. Among those are NVIDIA's Crush and AMD's 760MP chipset. So keep on
checking back throughout the week for more information on those technologies
and much more.
Politics at Computex 2001
One of the least fun, but sometimes most interesting, facets of this industry is a lot of the political happenings that take place behind the scenes. While we usually refrain from reporting on them, we were witness to something at Computex that was worthy of sharing.
Much like last year's Computex, VIA has a very noticeable presence on the show floor. While there aren't many new products from VIA this year, VIA's message was present almost everywhere - mainly in the form of VIA DDR balloons above various motherboard manufacturers' display booths.
However, at the request of Intel, many of the top tier motherboard manufacturers promptly removed the VIA DDR balloons. In one situation, a VIA balloon was cut loose and became stuck at the top of the convention hall while others were simply pulled down.
Since we were present when all of this was going on we saw the almost immediate transition from VIA DDR balloons to Intel Pentium 4 advertisements and promotional material.
As far as both AMD and VIA have come in recent times, it is still quite obvious that they still haven't reached the marketing muscle of Intel. While this situation had no bearing on the actual products seen at Computex, it was an interesting display of strong arming marketing tactics at their worst.
But now onto the actual products...
Intel owns the Show
While Intel isn't officially announcing any major products at Computex, that hasn't stopped other manufacturers from showing some of Intel's upcoming stuff. Just about every motherboard manufacturer was showing a Brookdale solution at their booth. Brookdale, which will be called i845, is Intel's next Pentium 4 chipset and will come with native PC133 SDRAM support. That means SDRAM support without the MTH fiasco of a couple years back.
Of course, the 1.06GB/s of memory bandwidth offered by PC133 is not nearly enough for the 3.2GB/s FSB of the Pentium 4, so expect at least a 20% performance hit over i850. Some motherboard manufacturers are even anticipating a greater than 20% performance hit. Clearly, the i845 is not designed to improve the Pentium 4's performance, but rather make the P4 more accessible to the mainstream and value markets.
The vast majority of i845 motherboards shown featured the upcoming Socket-478 interface that will be used on Northwood, the 0.13 micron version of the Pentium 4. As you can tell from the pictures, the socket is quite small, measuring about 1.5 x 1.5 inches, thanks to the use of a micro PGA pin out on the CPU.
Another thing to note is that the heatsink mounting holes around the socket are in a different position than they are on current Socket-423 motherboards. While this could mean that these boards will require new cases, the most likely situation is that Socket-478 motherboards will work in current cases and won't require the heatsink retention mechanism to be mounted to the case. This is made possible by the fact that the cooler running 0.13-micron Northwood will not require as large of heatsinks as the current 0.18-micron Pentium 4s.
We actually saw a Socket-478 CPU installed on an i845 motherboard at Gigabyte's booth. It was covered by a Pentium 4 sticker that was partially peeled back, exposing the aluminum heat spreader atop the CPU core.
This particular CPU is Willamette based, indicating that we will in fact see the current Pentium 4 migrate over to Socket-478 as well, probably in the next couple of months. The reason for this is that the micro PGA packaging is actually cheaper for Intel to produce. Unfortunately for current Socket-423 Pentium 4 owners, Intel will not be releasing a Socket-423 compatible Northwood. Motherboard manufacturers did confirm that they have Northwood samples in house running at 2GHz and above.
Northwood is apparently performing quite well and some previously skeptical motherboard manufacturers have renewed faith in the Intel/RDRAM platform.
From what we've been able to gather, Intel is still planning to follow their roadmap and wait until 2002 to launch a DDR platform for the Pentium 4. Many of the motherboard manufacturers are hoping it will be earlier and are actually pushing Intel to get it out earlier, but it seems that Intel is going to stick to their original plan, probably due to their licensing agreements with Rambus that will not be up until next year.
We did see an interesting board from MSI, the 850Pro2, based on the current i850 chipset. What makes this board interesting is that it will be the first 4 layer i850 board available. This is made possible by the repositioning of one of the RIMM slots such that it is perpendicular to the other three. At first glance, this location would seem to result in extremely long trace lengths to that slot, which could cause some serious issues. However, you must remember that RDRAM is a serial technology and the RIMM pinout allows this setup to exist while maintaining short trace lengths.
Intel Application Accelerator: Free Performance?
One thing they are launching during Computex is the Intel Application Accelerator. This software will supposedly decrease boot time by 10-20% while simultaneously boosting application performance 5-10%. These are of course Intel's results, as are the ones shown in the graphs below. It works on any motherboard with an 82801 ICH or 82801BA ICH2, which includes all i810, i815, i820, i840, and i850 motherboards yet apparently offers the greatest performance on Pentium 4 systems. Without a doubt, Intel has made certain that this utility will not work on AMD systems. Whether or not AMD has been able to duplicate the software has yet to be determined.
This could be a huge thing for Intel users, especially early adopters of the Pentium 4, as it would speed up normal everyday tasks. Also remember that one of the areas which the Pentium 4 currently lags behind in is business applications which are frequently disk performance limited - an area where the Application Accelerator is supposed to help.
Intel does know quite a bit about improving boot times as we've noticed that all of their motherboards (e.g. OR850, D850GB, etc…) boot into Windows noticeably faster than their 3rd party manufactured counterparts. It could very well be that some of this technology has made it into the Application Accelerator.
Note that there is a typo in this graph - the first bar for 5400RPM
drives should read 54 seconds.
We're not sure exactly what Intel has done to accomplish the application performance increases, but our sources tell us they've been working on it for close to a full year now and that it really does work. We remain a bit skeptical and will be testing it out as soon as we get back on our side of the world. The Winstone 2001 results they're claiming are especially surprising given the relatively large increase.
VIA breathes a sigh of relief
Leading up to the show, there was some question about what new toys VIA would be able to show at Computex this year. The big debate was whether or not their Pentium 4 DDR chipset would be officially announced since VIA has yet to complete negotiations with Intel for a Pentium 4 bus license. A little over 12 hours before the show opened, they made the call to go ahead with the P4X266 on the show floor and officially announce the chipset.
VIA has just received the first functional chips from the fab, so a running board was not yet available when we went by their booth. Expect VIA to try to beat the i845 to market with the P4X266, so we're looking at a Q3 launch.
The P4X266 will be using an updated version of the DDR memory controller that is currently in the KT266 which will offer greater memory performance.
Speaking of which, VIA has definitely lost some sleep over the recent barrage of SiS 735 reviews illustrating chipset performance greater than that of most competing solutions. If anything the SiS 735 reviews have been a call to action for VIA, so don't expect them to take the performance challenge too lightly. Keep in mind that the P4X266 will be using an improved DDR memory controller…
Other than that, VIA really didn't have anything really new at their booth. They did have updated versions of all their Socket-370 chipsets so that they can support Intel's upcoming Tualtin core Pentium III's.
Fortunately, we also got a chance to speak with a couple of the VIA guys regarding some of the issues that many have encountered with their chipsets. It looks like VIA is very committed to resolving all these issues, but some of the hold up is actually with motherboard manufacturers not taking the time to implement the appropriate fixes with BIOS updates. We'll be keeping in touch with VIA in hopes of helping to resolve many of these issues.
AMD
Because of the poor performance of the initial VIA KT266 chipset, AMD has decided to continue producing the 760 chipset. Many of the larger motherboard manufacturers have large amounts of the chipset on order and there are no indications that AMD will halt delivery on them.
According to our sources, AMD has informed motherboard manufacturers that the 760 will continue to be available until VIA's KT266 matures. The ALi MAGiK1 chipset is still performing poorly and although the SiS 735 offers great performance, SiS unfortunately has a very bad reputation in the North American market. It is honestly up to VIA to improve the KT266, but until then the AMD 760 will be here to stay. We expect to see the 760 stick around for at least a few more months.
The AMD 760MP chipset won't be announced until Tuesday, but we've known its been on the way for quite sometime. Our testing is complete and the finishing touches are being put on our review as you read this. Of course the official release date didn't stop a couple motherboard manufacturers from showing off their boards on the opening day of Computex.
Tyan of course had their Thunder K7 which we've had in the lab for quite some time now. It's a very impressive board, offering just about every feature you could ask for in a server motherboard. The Thunder K7 will be the first and only 760MP board available at the launch. Expect it to cost around $600 retail.
MSI was also showing a 760MP board, labeled only as the MS-6502 for now. While it's not as feature filled as the Thunder K7, it will come in at a much lower price. The current goal is to get it under $200 if possible, but we'll have to wait and see how that plays out. However, don't expect to see the MS-6502 until third or fourth quarter of this year.
These are the only two 760MP boards we've seen so far today, but once the official announcement is made, there should be a couple more on the show floor.
NVIDIA
While we can't say much about the Crush 11/12 chipsets from NVIDIA just yet, a few motherboard manufacturers already jumped the gun and are displaying NVIDIA based motherboards in their booths.
We will provide more information on NVIDIA's first entries into the chipset market later this week.
ATI
We haven't had a chance to make it over to the ATI booth just yet, but we did run into an ATI video card as we were browsing through the motherboard manufacturers' booths. That was at FIC, where we saw an OEM Radeon on display. The board was clearly manufactured by ATI, but is a clear indication that FIC will be taking advantage of ATI's recently announcement that they will no longer by the sole provider of boards based on their chips. This is a huge change in ATI's business model that will hopefully allow them to focus 100% on R&D so that they can keep up with NVIDIA's aggressive six month product cycles.
Back to the Show
As usual, we'll keep you up to date with everything that's going on at the show. There are definitely some very big announcements coming up so keep your browser at AnandTech and we'll make sure to fill it with the information you came for.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
