Watching nine MPEG-1 movies run at one time on screen gives one a fair indication of Willamette's number crunching but anyone that was present at the IA-32 track was either thinking in binary or just dead impressed by what looked like extremely impressive geometry capabilities. The crowded room was treated to a 3D real-time graphics showcase including water, floor and shadow reflections, lighting effects with multiple light sources coded by perennial 3D engine specialists, Rage Software. We certainly got the feeling that 3D gaming and T&L were high on Intel's priority. However, during a private meeting with Intel, we were not given any hard numbers regarding Willamette's 3D real-time geometry and lighting calculation possibilities.
But don't throw out that 3D card just yet… News travels fast and, as impressive as the demo was, perhaps all was not quite as it seemed? We were told by several sources that when Rage's Incoming Forces demo was launched during the session and the game began to skip frames and the 'wire frame' mode was imposed, the Willamette's T&L was disengaged in favor of an NVIDIA hardware T & L Quadro, which was apparently inside the system. However, Intel recently reaffirmed that "no Hardware T&L was used in their IDF Willamette demos."
Mixing early silicon with demo software on any Microsoft OS is apt to concoct a "school chemistry lab-type disaster" even at the best of times - we understand that - but nonetheless we were left extremely curious. Just how powerful are the Willamette's geometry capabilities? The wire frame mode did reveal more polys on screen than we'd seen in quite a while. For the few seconds that Incoming Forces chugged (it wasn't moving at 60fps) using Willamette's T&L it was still plainly obvious that it was way in excess of any x86's geometry capabilities. Quadro or no Quadro.
Intel hasn't officially stated that when the Willamette and its socketed design ships later on in Q3 of 2000, it'll be marketed as Pentium IV but it certainly seems likely. As the successor to the Pentium III and the desktop market, "Willamette will have scalability with a 3-5 year program" Intel's Jeff Austin told Sharky Extreme. Look for 1.3-1.4GHz Willamette's this autumn. Hopefully some of the questions concerning clock speeds, frequencies and amounts of cache will be answered sometime before then.
Those of you that nit-picked for code names in our older road map articles may have noticed the code name "Timna". At IDF, Timna was explained as we found out that it's not only a national park in Israel but it also happens to be the code name for Intel's future "smart integration" architecture. Timna will not be based on Willamette but on the good 'ol P6 micro-architecture and aimed at the low-cost segment to compliment the current Celeron line-up. Full integration with CPU, memory controller and graphics on to one chip usually turns off gamers. Turning on corporate users however is certainly where "Timna" is aimed at. Intel will probably use "Timna" for low-profile PCs such as the concept shown below.