CPU and Chipset

On the chipset end we did see a bit more action. ALi, AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, SiS, and VIA all had goodies on display. ALi was here discussing their new Opteron (K8) chipset. The M1687 North Bridge coupled with the M1563 South Bridge are loaded with AGP8X, and the requisite other components.

AMD

AMD also had their K8 chipsets up for display, the 8000 series. All of these utilize HyperTransport and also have AGP8X. As has been AMD’s trend, their own line of chipsets will not pose much competition to other chipset manufacturers. AMD’s goal is simply to have something out there, and should someone else make another chipset, they will by all means support it and push it. AMD also had a demo of their 4 and 8 way server configurations running.

For the near future, AMD is releasing the Thoroughbred, merely a die shrink of the Athlon XP. Speeds should increase steadily, and then AMD is slated to release Barton, which has an increased cache (512Kb L2). Then early next year we should see the arrival of the K8 and all the chipsets that entails.

Intel

Intel essentially had their new 845 and 850 platforms on display, not exactly a large surprise by any means. As has been voiced in many circles, Intel isn’t exactly keen on supporting RAMBUS anymore, which means that after the 850E, RIMMs are as good as dead in terms of support from Intel. (SiS has decided to carry the torch, but more on that later.) In the future, Intel will be releasing Granite Bay, their dual channel DDR solution.

NVIDIA

To the utter dislike of all involved, NVIDIA decided to place itself a good thirty minutes away from the show – for the second year in a row. Even though the food was good out there, I’ll take my $3 Mongolian BBQ any day of the week over a half hour traipse through the city streets of Taipei, in what can only be termed as semi-suicidal traffic.

NVIDIA basically had their own K8 solution on display along with a plethora of nForce II boards. From the specs we got to glance at, the new nForce certainly seems just as impressive as the last nForce. We did find out that NVIDIA will release a version of the chipset sans video adaptor right from the get go. This was one of the big faults of the initial launch last year. Most people were not willing to fork over a rather large sum of money for a feature they were sure to never use. We’d also like to note that NVIDIA is the only company to have had a dual channel DDR solution on the market for a year, that experience could translate to some good performance gains in this next generation.