Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/1999/08/22/last_week_in_microprocessors/

Last week in microprocessors 16-22 Aug 1999

A roundup of some of our chippy stories

By Team Register

Posted in On-Prem, 22nd August 1999 11:33 GMT

Far from being a quiet time of the year, August 1999 decided to keep everyone at The Register well busy. On the microprocessor front, we started the week by reporting that the Pentium II family has now reached the end of the road. Coupled to that, our favourite Japanese site Happy Cat posted a delicious Intel roadmap with some new codenames to excite the curious. We expected on the 18th of August to see a whole heap of support for the K7 chip, but little materialised, at least here in the UK. Midweek, Intel admitted it couldn't hack it in the discrete graphics chip business. Although our friends over at news.com maintained they had a scoop on this one, in reality we'd forecast that the 7x family would become dead duckies about a month earlier. Pete Sherriff caused his usual storm of protest when he released a whole set of his price/performance benchmarks, in anticipation of Celerons using Pentium III cores. (RegMark Lite shows Celeron trashing AMD Athlon and All-new RegMark99 shows Celeron outperforms Pentium III by 2.3 times and Coppermine Celeron waiting in wings) On Thursday, we learnt of a piece of Intel clocking software, NEWSPEED, which continued to attract a lot of attention through the rest of the week . Reports from Via towards the end of the week said it would go volume with the Cyrix "Gobi" S370 processor towards the end of the year. Early on Thursday, we scooped the world with our story about Alpha NT developers being laid off at a Compaq plant in the US. At a conference call on Monday, senior VP Enrico "The Cloak" Pesatori had pledged his company's support for Microsoft and also said the Alpha processor was still being pushed hard by Compaq. ®