2004 in review 2004 was a year of two distinct halves for the semiconductor industry, the first characterised by boom, the latter not so much bust as a vaguely downward slide. Final figures are not yet in for the last months of the year, but the start of the second half showed a clear decline. This prompted numerous revisions of forecasts made during the first, more vigorous half.

While 2003 showed all the first signs of recovery, growth was initially held in check by the SARS outbreak and the Iraq adventure. Those events past, 2004 saw a full-bodied boom as improving consumer confidence and a growing economies drove demand for electronics goods and, in turn, the semiconductor products on which they're based.

But in the second half of the year, chip makers' customers began spending less as consumer and business demand slowed. Instead of buying new chips, they focused on clearing the decks of all the parts they'd bought in the overly-optimistic (as it turned out) H1. That left chip fabs with huge quantities of unsold stock of their own as the inventory correction continued through H2.

Intel's troubled year

Intel finally launched its long-awaited 90nm desktop Pentium 4, 'Prescott', in February. It was all geared up to launch 'Dothan', its first 90nm Pentium M product, in the same month too, but in January the chip giant came clean and said the part had been delayed until the Spring. Dothan arrived in May.

Dothan and Prescott arguably provided a template for the rest of Intel's year, with products delayed - or dropped altogether. Among the latter, the 4GHz Pentium 4, promised in November 2003 to ship in Q4 2004. Ditto the next-generation of the Prescott, 'Tejas'.

Intended to take the platform to speeds above 4GHz, Tejas was knocked on the head in May, along with 'Jayhawk', Tejas' Xeon equivalent. Instead, Intel accelerated its dual-core plans, tapping into what's become the chip technology flavour of the moment: processors with multiple cores. ARM announced one; so did Motorola's spun off - and now independent - semiconductor division, Freescale; IBM was reported to be working on one too, codenamed 'Antares'. A single-core version is expected too.

AMD, by contrast to its arch-rival, has by and large executed as planned. True, the 90nm Opteron chip, originally scheduled (broadly) for a late 2004 debut did so by the skin of its teeth; but the company certainly got its 90nm desktop and mobile processors out in Q3, as forecast. The chips appeared in August, a month after AMD rolled out Sempron, an updated 32-bit processor line-up, initially comprising a number of more or less rebadged Athlon XPs, but then moving onto Athlon 64 parts with their 64-bit functionality disabled.

In addition to 90nm versions, AMD added the Socket 939 pin-out to the Athlon 64 line, enhancing the on-board memory controller to support dual-channel DDR memory, but knocking back the chips' L2 cache size while it was about it.

No execute

AMD also began touting its chips' ability to block the execution of code stored in memory reserved solely for data. The functionality has been there for some time, but Windows XP Service Pack 2 - which shipped in the summer - at last gave AMD a good reason to shout about it.

Ditto Transmeta, which pledged in May to incorporate the technology into Efficeon, its 90nm processor. Efficeon shipped "in limited numbers", but won't appear in volume until next year, when an updated version, capable of attaining 2GHz, sporting the second generation of the company's LongRun power conservation technology and incorporating the new, SSE 3 instructions Intel debuted with Prescott, ships.

Freescale's 90nm PowerPC G4-class MPC7448, announced in Q3 2004, will sample in H1 2005, with the dual-core, e600-based MPC8641D sampling H2 2005.

The Athlon 64's 'no execute' support got into trouble with the Dutch advertising agency recently. Intel simply drew fire from AMD fanboys for adopting the technology, adding the feature to a new core stepping, E-0. This was announced in June but did not arrive until Q4, most notably in the 3.8GHz P4 570J. Intel announced plans to update the Mobile P4 and 'Nocona' Xeon lines with the E-0 core.

Intel's 64-bit x86

Nocona was better known as Intel's first 64-bit x86 chip. The source of considerable speculation - mostly over whether it was derived from AMD's AMD64 technology - Nocona was formally announced in February and shipped in June. Two months later, P4 processors equipped with EM64T - Intel's Extended Memory 64-bit Technology - arrived for the workstation and server markets.

EM64T is expected to debut on desktop P4s next year. So too will 'Sonoma', Intel's second generation of Centrino, after yet another rescheduling of a 2004 release, although some chipsets are now getting out the door, apparently. Intel nontheless announced Napa, aka 'Centrino 3', and began showing off the 65nm dual-core Pentium M, 'Yonah'. It also admitted the existence of 'Smithfield', the anciticipated dual-core P4. While stating that the part will be fabbed at 90nm, the chip maker wouldn't go so far as to say that it is a true 'one die, two cores' part, and not two separate Prescott cores stitched together.

AMD's dual-core strategy calls for the debut of desktop dualies in the second half of 2005, with Opteron versions arriving "mid-2005", around the time Smithfield is due to arrive. Initial dual-core AMD parts will almost certainly be fabbed at 90nm - AMD reckons volume 65nm production will take place sometime in 2006.

Even so, it's still expected to boost its market share next year as Intel faces the results of 2004's tribulations. However, nalysts warn that competition will be fiercer come 2006.

Itanic

Intel launched a 9MB L3 cache version of its Itanium 2 processor, but the year also saw the chip's co-creator, HP, ship its Itanium team over to Intel and hand over responsibility for future Itanic development. HP accounts for 70 per cent of world Itanium server shipments, though it knocked IA-64 workstations on the head in September.

By contrast, AMD's Opteron finally won Sun's support - or at least its formal support; AMD-based boxes are said to have begun shipping in 2003 - and Dell got as close as it ever has to saying it will end its Intel-only policy and adopt Opteron. When it might actually happen, is another matter altogether. ®