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Hardware Roundup Spitfire pricing pops up on Web

We shake out a few of the CobWebs

At AMD Zone, there's info on some mobo upgrades as well as more information about the firm's mobile offerings, along with links to its own benchmarks. The chaps have also pointed to this page which gives pricing for AMD's up and coming Spitfire chippie. At Hard OCP, the lad has a major preview of the Voodoo 5500 AGP. Kyle had the pix yesterday. Aargh! According to Ace's Hardware, Toshiba has released a water cooled portable. Ace's also has prices for the AMD mobile parts, mentioned elsewhere. Tom's Hardware has a round up of TV cards for your PC, which you can find at this page. Shell Extension, which we haven't been to for a little while, is offering prizes for people that come up with the best 2020 Internet dreams. Jonathan Hou has a good chipset article over at Fullon 3D. At Ars Technica, and on this page right here, there's a piece by a physicist about DNA Computing. ® 18 April 2000 Will the debate never end? We wish sometimes it would but y'know, these things have a habit of turning up again. Over here at InQuest, analyst Bert McComas compares DDR (double data rate) synchronous memory with Rambus dual channel memory. Here is what is described as an exhaustive performance analysis of the issues. RMBS fans, please do not send abusive emails to yours truly... Doctor Tom Pabst takes a look here at two muvvaboards from Epox and Asus. Elsewhere, on Tom's Hardware Guide, you'll see that he has also heard from system builders about Intel's incredible shrinking supply problems. There's a piece on Anandtech about overclocking the flip chip Celerons. Kyle Bennett at Hard OCP has some pix of the Voodoo 5 5500 AGP up there at the top of his overclockin' site. Oh no! It's SETI again. Here at Ars Technica there's a piece about the teams and how they're doing. And, in response to our piece about SETI being a waste of time, some kind dude has sent us information on another piece of distributed computing, this time all about prime factorisation with a prize of $100,000... ® 17 April 2000 At Gampeplay, there's an interview with UK Quake 3 player Hakeem. Interested in what Taiwanese mainboard manufacturer Abit is up to? There's an interview here at Fullon 3D. There's an update on the availability of AMD and CPUs over at JC's pages. Sharky Extreme has updated its monthly hardware guide and you can find the Web page here. Anandtech takes a look at a Via-based chipset from Elitegroup, a major Taiwanese mobo player. There's some discussion over at Ace's Hardware about packaging/yields on Intel's Coppermine processors. 14 April 2000 Mr K. Bennett, the man who put the word hard into Hard OCP has got some benchmarks of AMD's Thunderbird up. If you thought microprocessors worked in some miraculous fashion, you're wrong. It's just that you can get a lot more valves on a piece of silicon than on a 1500 square foot motherboard. And over at Tweak 3D, there is a piece about how the Athlon works. The air traffic controller over at Fullon 3D has some interesting words to say about market penetration... The cobblers at Anandtech are keeping to their last in this piece, which is part of the monthly hard drive roundup what they do. There's a review of Intel's Celeron 600MHz chip over this way at Sharky Extreme. ® 13 April 2000 This must have been a day AMD Zone has been waiting for and sho'enough, the site does a good job on summarising a Jerry Sanders conference call and pulling together the different threads for AMD's successful quarter. As well that summary, the front page points to wire stories reporting on news. There's a transcript of the conference call over at JC's site. Anandtech has a review of a 64Mb GeForce product over at this page. A good round up over at Tom's Hardware on how to upgrade that pesky machine that's sitting on your desktop. There's a guide to choosing the right PC at CPU Review. ® 12 April 2000 There's a very useful piece over at Tom's Hardware Guide today which is a kind of ready reckoner for people building their own systems and who want to know how to use the right chips and the right chipsets for the right result. Ars Technica is running a poll on whether Intel's recently released Cloppermine Celerons are too little, too late. And at Ace's Hardware, there is a story saying that HP will release an AMD K6-2+ in a notebook next week. There's a review of the Abit Athlon KA7 over at Anandtech. It uses the Via KX-133 chipset and that old Slot A stuff. It's a little while since we mentioned it, but Kenneth Ekman over at Kenneth's Tech keeps up to date on developments in the chip and component business, as well as linking to quite a few of our own stories here. ® 11 April 2000 August souls at share price newspaper The Wall Street Journal have woken up to the realities of overclocking and interviewed photograph and chip abuser Kyle Bennett of Hard OCP about the realities of making a PC sing sing. A piece written by the ravens (surely mavens, ed) at The Wally which you can find here provided you've paid your subscription, looks at the overclocking phenomenon and quotes Kyle, who rather optimistically claims that the life of a CPU is 10 years. We've seen the photos of chips you've blown up on Hard OCP Kyle, not to mention those of elderly gentlemen that work at The Reg... Lots about Via chipsets on the Web yesterday and today. At Tom's Hardware there's a very comprehensive guide to 21 Slot One mobos that use Via chipsets. The good doctor Pabst is using new lab facilities the site has just inaugurated in Germany. At Digital Web 3D there's also a roundup of motherboards using Via technology. Our hardworking friends at AMD Zone have posted a link to a place offering a competition to see when AMD's share price reaches $100. That place is here. There's a good piece over at Tweak 3D, which goes into detail about the technical aspects of 3D or surround sound. Following on from there, at Anandtech, there's a piece about Cambridge Soundworks Digital speakers. It's always worth flying by Ace's Hardware. There's a piece up about the AMD equivalent of "slotket" cards -- they're the jobbies that people currently use to bridge the gap between Intel Slot One and Flip Chip packaging. Of course, AMD is making the jump to Socket A, so there's a market there too. But excuse us, don't we remember both Intel and AMD saying they had to use slots rather than conventional sockets because of "technological issues"? Those technological arguments seem to have dissipated pretty quickly... Lastly, but not in the bit leastly, trying to make a jigsaw puzzle a little like Intel's IXA strategy? If so, get over to Hardware.com and take a look at this $58.57 variable speed orbital action jig saw kit. ® 10 April 2000 The i815 chipset is so nearly alive that Fullon3D has managed to link to beta drivers for it. The site also provides a link to this place, which has a picture of the DCS 370SMA, a mobo which uses the 815. Here at Ars Technica is an interesting piece about how the nearly impossible becomes probable. It's about Peltier (thermoelectric) coolers. Good stuff from Ars again. Our German friends at c't are indicating that AMD Thunderbirds will fly out of Fab 30 in volume in June at speeds of 1GHz and using Socket A. Tom's Hardware Guide takes a look at the Seventh Internet World. And if you think Tom's was a little harsh on Rambust, have a gander at this iXBT Labs comparative review on the current state of affairs. Thanks to JC News for the link. ® 7 April 2000 That's what Kyle "Metatag" Bennett reckons in a piece over at Hard OCP. He asks if they are as good as the 300A Celerons of hoary antiquity. Or something like that. Hardware Central attracted quite a bit of flak from its readers after we posted a link pro-Rambus piece here. If you look at the messages section, you'll notice that many folk have technical differences of opinion with what the chap has to say. There's a review of the Asus AGP V6800 Deluxe and Creative Labs Annihilator Pro combo at Tom's Hardware Page. Anandtech takes a gander here at the Nvidia 64Mb Geforce. ® 6 April 2000 A modification that transforms a Promise Fastrak card into a Raid card with more promise has led to Kyle Bennett at Hard OCP getting a letter from m'learned friends. Promise's lawyers told Kyle that he must remove metatags using the Fastrak word and told him to stop displaying the Fastrak mark on his site. Interesting. Is using a word in a metatag an infringement of a trademark? This would be an interesting legal case indeed. Kyle told The Register that he didn't think Promise had any kind of case but last time he (successfully) fought a legal case it cost him $6,000 and he doesn't feel like "winning" again. The article which Promise doesn't like turns a Promise Ultra 66 card into a very functional Raid card for the price of a resistor or two. And while the metatags may have disappeared from Kyle's site, the original article is still there. Of course, metatags are HTML elements which are, basically, text. Search engines find references faster in metatags than by searching articles on Web sites. Can it really be the metatags that are cheesing off Promise? Or is it the cheap mod to the card? At Tom's Hardware there's a piece about the 150MHz bus project. This is a very lucid piece about the infamous front side bus (FSB) and what the different speeds mean in practical terms. There's an updated FAQ here at AMD Zone which the boys have posted to answer all the questions they get about AMD's Athlonium... A French site which you can find here, is claiming an exclusive on the ATI Rage 6. Get your Babelfish or your Lernout & Hauspie software out. A site that's new to us, System Logic, has posted a review of iWill's ATA 66 Raid controller. There's an overview of the Asus S370/133 Slocket at PC Stats. A piece at JC's pages compares specs of AMD's up and coming Thunderbird to Intel's Willamette. Y'know, Anandtech is right -- good cases are important if you wanna build your own PC. Some of the cases we've used for our builds have left our little pinkies looking like little reddies. Here, Anandtech looks at a Fong Kai enterprise chassis. Anandtech, which seemed to be down when we looked at it yesterday, also has a good piece about PC-133 on its main page. ® 4 April 2000 An article at Ace's Hardware is there to follow up on its suggestion a couple of days ago that both the AMD and the Intel 1GHz processors have something of the snake in the grass about them. There are responses from both AMD and Intel to the original allegations. Over at Sharky Extreme there's another GeForce review, this time focusing on the GA-GF 2560. At Frosty Tech there's a look at 30 second slocket tweaks for those who have a hankering for the quick and the dirty. Chris Tom at Slot A has posted a review of the Soltek SL-77KV. He says it's more stable than the Epox 7KXA and has extra features. Our daily look at Hardware Com reveals the existence of the six cup Electric Granpappy Deep Fryer which will let you fry six chips at once, if you fancy overclocking them... ® 3 April 2000 Not content with references on Intel data sheets which suggested that two Intel 1GHz Coppermine processors would find it hard to tango together, Hardware Central decided to put it to the test. According to this lengthy piece, they managed to get the chips to tango with relatively little difficulty and suggest it's the constraints of overheating -- rather than anything inherently different about the 1GHz processors, that caused Intel to tender this advice. In between the beginning and the end, the site had to do some modifications which many will feel unable to attempt themselves. But to us, the most fantastic thing about this report was that the site actually got hold of two 1GHz Pentium III processors. There's a piece at AMD Zone which says that Tyan has released a BIOS update for its Trinity K7 muvvaboard. At AMD Extreme there's a review of no fewer than 11 devices to aid the hardy to overclock their Athlons. Over at Hard OCP, there's a review of Abit's Siluro GeForce, which your man thinks is a bit of alright. On the gaming front, Blue's News reports that it has its mitts on Black & White, Lionhead's new "god game". Finally, for all you overclockers, we'd like to refer you to one of our most visited sites, Hardware.com. Here you will find a nifty Lithium based smoke detector for only $19.95 that may be the first to let you know that your experiments have gone awfully awry... ® 31 March 2000 There's a very detailed account of what 3dfx is up to over at Penstarsys. The author, Josh Walrath, includes financial information, new info on the VSA-100 chip, Voodoo, Rampage, Sage, and an analysis of the firm's GigaPixel takeover. Johan over at Ace's Hardware is saying that there's a snake in the grass as far as the Intel 1GHz and the AMD 1GHz chips are concerned. He reckons they've achieved that by overclocking the processors in some kind of fashion.This may also explain why Intel 1GHz processors won't copulate properly, as we've written elsewhere today. The interesting piece looks at some technological conjuring tricks which seem to be happening at fabs. It also compares power requirements and looks at how the 1 Gigahype processors compare with other processors slated by the two firms. The boys at AMD Zone have updated a poll on what the industry would like like if AMD wasn't there. Bill Henning at CPU Review has been dabbling with that Mandrake unixy stuff again. ® 30 March 2000 Are Mattel and Intel an unlikely couple? Over at Tom's Hardware Guide you can find out what the boys think about Intel microscopes and the rest... Sharky Extreme has a large chunk of Intel roadmap up on its site today. Go here for more details. At Anandtech there's a review of the Tyan Trinity KX-133 motherboard. According to the boys, the real deal will be the successor to this particular baby. Here's a piece of self-referential doo-dah for you. This morning we noticed a report on a Real Estate news wire, and knowing that Chris Tom of AMD Zone lives in Austin, Texas, we thought he'd be interested in it. Sure enough he is. And if you go to his site you'll find a link to the Real Estate story... At Ars Technica, which you can find here, there's a very good piece about PlayStation II's Emotion Engine. Our Aussie friends at Overclockers have put up a piece about the Golden Orb Socket 370 cooler, plus some other devices. Want, need a temperature gauge on front of your PC? That Texan lad Kyle has some how-to stuff here, as well as a more ambitious project which we'll pass over... ® 29 March 2000 At ABC News, an article about AMD's William Jeremiah Sanders III by Michael Malone waxes so lyrical that apotheosis for Jerry seems like it's only a cat's whisker away. We don't know whether Mr Malone has ever read Inside Intel by Tim Jackson, which suggests there is another side to the man who heads up the Great Satan of Taperecorders. At Tom's Hardware, there's a brand new piece about an IDE Raid controller, as well as more information about storage. And so the Celeron IIs with Screaming Sindie extensions came to pass, and quite a few sites already have reviews of what Intel considers is an AMD-Killa. There's one here and another one at Anandtech. Doubtless more will appear at other sites over the next few days. Ace's Hardware has a link to a site which suggests that double data rate (DDR) memory has been...err...doubled again. There's a reasonable Buyer's Guide over at Anandtech. Internal Intel documents describing slot to socket converters have angered some of the manufacturers. Iwill, in particular, is incandescent. Over at Hard OCP, Todd Burch has something to say on the topic. By the way Todd, we've updated our original story to include your comments. Perhaps you could take Intel to task for its opinions? ® 28 March 2000 Sandpile! Why haven't we been there for so long? The site, which you can find at this unique resource locator (address) is here. This isn't a news site, but it does have some very reliable information on the IA-32 architecture. And if you need to get your facts right for a piece you're doing on older CPUs, there's even a museum section. Missed this a day or two back but there's a guide to buying PC hardware over at Sharky Extreme. You can find a guide to buying retail parts at another web site, PC Stats. Silicon News, which we haven't visited before -- sorry about that -- has a pricing comparison article between Pentium IIIs and Athloniums. PlayStations and PCs? Those interested in PC emulation may care to hightail it over to 3D Unlimited, where there's a review of Bleem! Ars Technica, which seems to be getting better and better by the day, is reporting that you can get the Be OS for nowt today. Go here for the story. Ars also has a link to this PC World article which appears to show that Windows 2000 runs faster than Windows 98. Today's top item on Hardware.com is an $8.99 bow/hacksaw combo, similar to the model we used to saw the plastic off our Acorn Atom because the Motorola chip was melting the case. This handy item can also be used to saw hacks in half. Over at Hardware-One, some poor chap has spent days messing about with a resistor and a Raid system. It's all paid off and he reviews the Promise Raid system versus the iWill Side Raid 66. ® 27 March 2000 A site to which we've linked a while back, Tomato Over Clockers, has gone down to Akihabara, bought an expensive 866MHz Pentium III (see below) and clocked it to 1006MHz. The page is in English. And, according to this Japanese page at Impress Watch, 900MHz and 950MHz Athlons have started shipping in Akihabara. So too, by the way, have Pentium III 866MHz parts (see above). Is Aureal in difficulties? Exactly right, says Fullon 3D, which reports in its scoop that a whole set of suits has left for pastures new. At Anandtech there's a roundup on Athlon mobos. Has the lad started paying his mum yet, we wonder? Young JC is on his latest availability of processors tour again. Ars Technica here takes a look at the fab superslim Sony Viao. The ultimate notebook accessory? Kyle Bennett, the man who overclocks pictures of aged Register journalists, has a super picture here of a Cyrix chip bursting into flames due to excessive application of energy. Need to trim your hedgehog or get rid of all those microns one thousandth of an inch the width of a human hair from sprouting out of your CPU? Hardware.Com has the answer. ® 24 March 2000 Ace's Hardware points to an article in the Denver Post. Apparently, Sun is taking legal action against old Kingston Technology over an alleged breach of one of its own memory module patents. That could be worth a fortune to Sun if it succeeds in the action. There is now confirmation of the official existence of Abit's Athlon KA7 board, AMD Zone says, so confirming earlier information the Web site posted. There's also an update on a Sledgehammer article at the same place. It's been a little while since we visited Fullon3D, with this page pointing to a review of a Tyan dual mobo. And also a while since we visited fine games site Blue's News, which has word of version 6.1 of the Counter-Strike modification for Half-Life. There's some thought provoking opinions at the Chip Geek end of Ugeek.com, concerned with the shenanigans that our dearly beloved and restless semi industry has seen in the last week. ® 23 March 2000 At AMD Zone, there's a piece about good old Motorola and its G4e technology. According to this, AMD will be able to use some super duper Moto technology in its Thunderbird core. Kyle Bennett at Hard OCP points to this thread here, which has some interesting info about SMP on flip chip Intel processors. This Sharky Extreme page has some info about PlayStation 2 with a hands-on look at the dinky, minxy little box. There's another look at the Japanese Playstation 2 at this German language site. The conclusion here is that USB, Firewire and the slot for PC-Cards being offered have no real use, that is, these do not work yet. These, say the reviewer, are options from 2001. This might also be true for the European launch. This site says that the Playstation 2 is a power hungry beast, and, at present, at least, does not challenge the PC market in any way. At Ars Technica, there's a piece on some clever cool morphing technology from our old friends at Hewlett-Packard. ® 22 March 2000 The boys at Anandtech have finally got their mitts on Aopen's KX133 based Athlon mobo. They tease us with the headline, was it worth the wait? The answer can be found here. Apparently, there are good and bad things to say... Over at JC's pages, there is a story saying the 815 will arrive mid-June. That's in line with Intel roadmaps but wethinks it had better get its skates on before then, if reports about sales of Camino are to be believed. And they are. Ars Technica, once more, has got some lucid stuff up on its site. This time they're looking at i820 and i840 chipsets and telling the world their findings. You can find the report here atArs' Wankerdesk. That fine chap BATTLAX has been up to his tricks again, this time reporting that 950MHz Athlons will go for sale in Japan on the 25th of this month. You can find the link, in Japanese, here. ® 21 March 2000 There's a review of the possibly very difficult to find Pentium III 866MHz processor here at Sharky Extreme. Tom's Hardware takes a butchers at overclocking AGP graphics at this place. Our friends at Ars Technica have posted a review of two Asus SDR cards, the V6600 GeForce Pure Sgram SDR and the SDR Deluxe. Not often we look at those awful LAN things in this space, but this piece over at Tweak3D will whet the appetites of those who want to have a LAN party (gruesome thought), and play those networking games. Kyle Bennett, out on parole after being sentenced to 10 for defacing pictures, has paid a visit to 3DFx and took his Kodak Brownie with him... ® 20 March 2000 A preview of AMD's Sledgehammer 64-bit with backward 32 bit compatibility can be found at this page. The author is an engineering major at the University of Austin and previews what we are likely to see from AMD next year. He makes the point that even though we may hear the marchitecture term "OS optimised for Itanium" over the next nine months, there is still room for AMD to have a bash at the 64-bit market. Today is Coppermine 866MHz, 850MHz day, and sho'enuff, here at Anandtech, there is a look at how these two pieces of the Intel jigsaw will compare. There's a Pricewatch availability comparison here at JC's pages. The lad has been doing the legwork on how easy it is to get Copperwhines and Nafflons over the last month or so and presents his latest survey here. And Bill Henning at CPU Review has updated his comparison of AMD and Intel processors to take account of the latest introduction of microprocessors from the chip equivalents of Tweedledee and Tweedledum. ® 17 March 2000 Zengine has a piece about Diamond's new Rio and a picture, to boot. There is now a total of 69 mobos for the Athlon CPU. Go here to see the list. Over at Frosty Com there's a piece about 350 watt power supplies...that will keep your waffles warm. At Sparkling PC there's a guide to choosing motherboards. And Insane Hardware takes a leaf out of HardOCP's book and overclocks an FC-PGA Intel Copperwhine chip. A good read, this one. Finally, over at this German PC Welt site, there is a story claiming that Intel's 1GHz processor is just a gimmick, with real systems late to arrive. ® 16 March 2000 Chris Tom at Slot A has posted a review of the Soyo K7 motherboard, which he says displays solid characteristics. Anandtech has posted a review of the ATI Rage Mobility 128, which you can find at this page. Sharky Extreme has visited Abit in Taiwan and has much to say about the company and its future strategy. Johan, at Ace's Hardware has posted a sensible and informative piece about the 1Gigglehurts nonsense that happened last week. There's also a piece, also by Johan, all about overclocking Athlons which is well worth a read. ® 15 March 2000 There's a useful piece over at Ars Technica called 3½ SIMD. The piece looks at what PlayStation and Motorola's G4 have in common, and also has a decent waltz around Sun's MAJC architecture, which is up and coming. At Tech Review there's a weekly update on CPU pricing. Thanks to JCs pages for the link. Prices, as the piece points out, depends on whether you're an enthusiastic end user, a system builder, or a reseller, and there are many variables to consider aside from that. JC also points to some Japanese Intel roadmaps on Pricewatch Japan, which we may well return to later in a separate story. JC also points to a Silicon Investor post. The Great Satan of Software is, apparently, already talking about an X-Box II. Why not an X-Box XIII while it's at it? Can't now see it on JC's current page, but noticed that he had an interesting piece on when our friend Andreas Stiller from c't visited Transmeta. There's a round up of ATA 66 hard drives over at Anandtech which is worth a look. ® 14 March 2000 At this On 24 video sort of place place it was interesting to see that AMD logos were everywhere. The X-Box site itself was showing info about an x86 compatible chip which seemed, on the face of it, to be an AMD processor (now stalinised, alas). While Microsoft in Australia was so convinced that an AMD chip was in there that it announced it to the Sydney Morning Herald, which has printed a funny story about the goof. Well, last week was gigglehurts week, after all... This site has an interview all about Nvidia and the X-Box. Away from that nonsense for a while to this story in the local Austin newspaper, telling a tale about Intel's attempts to build a sizeable presence in the area. It's a good read. The engineers want a pool table... There's also more information on AMD Zone about these shenanigans. To hardware matters. The Tech Report has published a review of Matrox's 32MB Millennium G400 card which you can find here. Slot A points to this Asus page, with formal announcements of the K7V and K7V-RM. Slot A says its surprised by the lateness of the formal announcement. We're still hearing that there are some, shall we say difficulties, with the Via chipset. Lastly, no thanks whatever to Hard OCP for printing an incriminating photograph of a Register journalist :) . In fact, the picture was taken at SnoBIT 2000, as part of a feature our colleagues at CHIP magazine are creating about online journalists.... ® 10 March 2000 CPU Review has revised its comparison of Athlon and Cumine processors in its latest update. Bill Henning shows that the Athlon is around 43 per cent cheaper than the equivalent CuMine at the popular 700MHz rating. Go to his pages for more info. At 3D Hardware is a word of a little device helpful to the overclocking fraternity and which allows the use of old Celeron heatstinks. And more on the popular overclocking front. The boys at Overclockin.. have reviewed something called the PowerCharger which they say gives extra flexibility when you want to heat your Athlon up to the limit. Quite a few sites, including JC, Anandtech and Ace's Hardware have taken a decko at the AMD roadmap chart at Pricewatch down there in old Akihabara. The news is about socketed Athlon processors, which we anticipated would arrive in April/May, and which these pages seem to confirm. A quick run through of the quite lengthy Japanese pages with Lernout & Hauspie's Japanese-English translator indicates the following. Power consumption has gone up to 65W with an Athlon 1GHz processor, but that better process technology and the introduction of Thunderbird will lower that to 60W in Q2. The pages say AMD will be able to supply several hundred thousand 1GHz processors by end of Q2, quoting Shunsuke Yoshisawa, of AMD Japan. There could even be as many as between 500,000 and 2.5 million, if L&H software translates properly. If so, we at The Reg would expect AMD to significantly lower the price of its 1GHz offerings and pretty early on (April?). The same Japanese AMD guy said it was possible that 1GHz Athlons would be available for general sale by early April. Thunderbird, its on-die Athlon, will ship in May and start at speeds of 1GHz, the article appears to say. Mr AMD Japan won't say whether the Thunderbirds will use .18 micron technology. But OEMs may not ship until the end of Q2. Last month, AMD successfully migrated the Athlon to copper interconnect at Dresden, but is still predicting Q3 for mass ramp of these chips. It produced the first copper core for the Athlon last November. In Q2 (round about nowish), AMD will shift Athlon to its HiP6L process, and that's why it won't ramp in full volume until Q3. Thank you to the two Belgians for helping us out with this translation. ® 9 March 2000 When you want to know whether there are supplies of processors and machines available, the best thing to do is call the vendor, and that's exactly what JC did yesterday. Some nice Big Blue chap told him it would have a grand total of 39 1GHz processors. JC also contacted other vendors...well worth a look. And, on the same topic, one of our readers sent in the following joke which makes a telling point. "I write to you today in order to relate a favorite story of my deceased mother. It serves as acid commentary on Intel's announcement, this day, of their $900.00, 1GHz Pentium processor. A woman walks into a butcher shop and asks, "How much are you selling your chickens for today?" The butcher replies, "99 cents per pound." The woman responds, "But the supermarket on the next block is selling chickens for 79 cents per pound." The butcher responds: "So why don't you go and buy your chicken at the supermarket?" The woman replies, "They don't have any chickens in stock." The butcher takes a long, hard look at the woman and replies: "Lady, when I'm out of chickens, I charge 49 cents per pound!" Away from headless chickens and 1GHz processors, AMD Zone points to a roadmap posted on a Japanese site which contains more info than we've already received. Kyle Bennett at Hard OCP points to this overclocking FAQ on Athlons. CPU Review has a piece up about the race to a gigahertz, and Bill Henning also posts some Linux bits and pieces now he's been bitten by that bug. Been a little while since we visited our friends at Geek.Com, and notice that they have posted a look at the Apex 600A DVD/MP3 player. These folk also have a chippy site, called Chip Geek, which has some interesting explanations of all of them thar slots and sockets. ® 8 March 2000 Here's a fine piece of work over at Ace's Hardware, which goes into detail about the UltraSparc III Riscy chip and Solaris software, and also may explain just why Intel and Itanium folk are so worried about Sun Microsystems. AMD Zone has an interesting little snippet on its site. Apparently the New York Stock Exchange asked AMD to explain its unusual share activity yesterday....has it asked Rambus about its share activity recently :) ? At JC's page there's some discussion on when the 100MHz barrier was breached, and also an interesting discussion about the future of memory technology. Tom's Hardware has posted a second piece about the gunfight at the 133MHz front side bus corral... And at Anandtech, there's a piece about the 1GHz Coppermine. As we've pointed out elsewhere today, IBM is already advertising an Aptiva using the 1GHz chip... ® 7 March 2000 We watched Mr Jerry Sanders III looking pretty happy on CNN last night but decided that we'd give the hardware sites a day's grace before we pointed to their reviews. But now it's time. First, to Anandtech, where the folk take a look at the beast, which they give a rating of eight out of 10. The site makes the point that if clock rates sell, the Athlon will go, go go... Now to Sharky Extreme. The Sharkyites make the point, which we've also mentioned here, that on cache die is an important issue, and one which is somewhat overshadowed by the raw speed. And, to the credit of the site, it says that if graphics companies released their cards in 5MHz increments, everyone and its dog would be well confused. At Ace's Hardware, the boys haven't looked at a system yet but have a gander at the available benchmarks, and, once again, point the finger at the matter of cache. Our old sparring buddies at ZD Net take a look at Gateway and Big Q systems using the 1GHz Athlon Powers. The Presario gets four out of five blobs, and the Gateway three out of five blobs. Not as many as we first thought...the jury is still out and there will be more. If we've missed your site out, drop us a line and we'll add it in... ®

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