Willamette to have triflingly short shelf life

Computex 2000 For all the fanfare made by Intel about its up-and-coming IA-32 processor codenamed Willamette, it has emerged that another IA-32 processor will displace it within a period of four months or so.

Willamette is scheduled to appear towards the end of this year, at clock speeds rising to 1.4GHz but conversations with a number of motherboard vendors has revealed they have no plans to support it.

Instead, they will wait for the next generation, codenamed Tulloch, which Intel has told them will arrive in the second quarter of next year.

One of the reasons for the reluctance to adopt Willamette is that Tulloch, although essentially based on the same architecture, will have 479 pins, rather than 423 pins. It is also expected to clock in at around 1.6GHz or 1.7GHz according to sources.

There will be two versions, one with a single Rambus channel and one with a dual channel, according to sources.

This, of course, is all terribly confusing. Tulloch was slated by some to be the successor chipset for the Northwood chip. Intel has obviously got codename psychosis, for if even one of its top tier mobo manufacturers in Taiwan thinks this, it shows a level of disenchantment hardly ever seen before. ®