|
|
Clearly, support for AMD in Taiwan has never been better. A factory and SMT line tour of Gigabyte revealed that some 25% of the current product line are Super 7 based boards. The majority share of those are still in favor of Intel but who'd have though that AMD would claim a 25% stake of all Gigabyte Super7 based motherboards? This figure was fairly consistent with the other major players and we were told that by the year 2000 AMD hopes to have a total of 13 million units based upon the K6 processor. With the recent release of the 500MHz AMD K6-2, the future signs still look good in the Super 7 sector. In fact, Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers will continue to utilize the Ali and SiS provided chipsets with integrated VGA coming from S3 (the Savage 4 & Savage 2000) and SiS (530/540).
Several sources pointed out the fact that Slot-A is not going to have (at least on the lower-end) a long lasting life for the Athlon as AMD plans to move to a socket based Athlon 'Select' launch next year for the low-end. The Socket 423 (number of pins) could change and plans are to build more capacity for memory and integrate an 8MB L2 cache (for the very high end). You can expect Gigabyte, ASUS and MSI et al. to be releasing socket based Athlon motherboards in Q1 of next year. More good news for AMD comes as the company has allegedly gotten their Dresden factory online, thus the shift to .18micron happening by late November is rapidly becoming a distinct possibility. Bearing in mind that the Athlon 700 is due to start shipping in October, AMD looks certain to grab yet more attention.
So what about the Big I? Well for Intel's latest plans (including Merced) take a look at Craig's IDF report but there were quite a few bits of information that we did pick up whilst over in Taiwan. Sources inside the motherboard industry said that the overall key messages that Intel is sending outare:
- Say good bye to Slot 1. Coppermine is moving from Slot 1 to Socket 242 PGA 370.
- 133MHz Front-side bus will be introduced by the end of September with the Camino chipset and 810e.
- The jump from Socket 370 to Socket 423 will only occur after 733mhz.
- The 820 (Camino) and 810e will be introduced on September 27th with the 840 (Carmel) by October.
- Even though the 820 has yet to appear, there was some talk of the follow-up product code named 'Camino2' or 'ICH2'. The major difference will apparently be the South bridge with ATA 100 for hard drives and USB 2.0. The Camino will support ATA 66 so the ATA 100 should push the envelope even further.
- The most exciting news we heard was of Intel's plans for their "Tejema" 1.2Gigaherz processor. Yes that's right- 1.2GHz. Current plans are to release this mammoth CPU in the second half of 2000. This release time frame might well change if AMD can get their ramp up to speeds approaching 1Ghz by that time.
|
|
|