Intel to dribble out 1GHz Cumine this month

Updated Michael Kannellos, at news.com is a thoughtful and cautious reporter and when we saw his scoop about Intel dragging a 1GHz Coppermine screaming and kicking into the world this month, we had to give it credence. We understand Intel will make a formal announcement about this on Wednesday, the 8th of March. Sure enough, we are reliably informed that elements of the story, which is that Intel will ship a 1GHz Coppermine this month, are true enough. To the yes or no question we asked Intel we got no answer, and this, coupled with some chats to other folk leads us to believe it's going to happen. This piece of information also sheds some light on the postponement of the 866MHz and 850 MHz Coppermines Intel was telling its channel about in January and February. Right up until Monday last, these little items were on Intel's channel developer page. A source exceedingly close to the company said the message was a trifle ambiguous but said that the 866MHz and 850MHz were on track. Cough. Oh, and if you still don't believe us about this, look at this Intel internal memorandum that we published a while back, which gives the following information "There will be a significant price move on Intel® Pentium® III and Celeron™ processors on February 27, 2000 as Intel transitions to higher performance levels" as well as other facts and figures on the famine. And what does Intel's channel feel about this? One major German distributor said this morning that it will be nice to see 800MHz Coppermines, never mind 866MHz, 833MHz and 1GHz Coppermines -- which he hasn't been told about yet. Despite the fact that supply of CuMines is improving a tad, he said there were still "glitches", particularly during this week. The latest move is most interesting, given that we know Athlon Powers can roll out his 1GHz microprocessor, well, round about now. It's a game of call my bluff, and, unfortunately, we believe that Intel has been panicked into making this move. It's lost a heap of market share to AMD in Q1 this year, and we'll report on that little phenomenon a little later on. You can find Michael's story here. Well done, that man. An Intel representative in the UK said that he could not comment on unannounced products. ®