Roadmap continued

Rambus inside?

One interesting aspect of Timna is memory support, before the official announcement it was believed that Timna would support RDRAM.

Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Desktop Products Group later clarified that RDRAM wasn't used because of supply issues. Sometime during 2001, an RDRAM version will be released under a different brand name.

The interesting aspect of this is that later during the week it was revealed that Timna contained a Rambus interface that could conceivably connect to Direct RDRAM memory. However, Intel decided to disable this interface with no option to enable it, even if an OEM desired to use it.

Therefore, Timna will support SDRAM via a memory translator hub. If you recall our ASUS P3C2000 review, our tests with the memory translator hub (MTH) and the 820 chipset revealed a significant performance hit. Hopefully Intel will improve the MTH's performance between now and Timna's release.

Power PC's!

In the performance processor segment the Pentium III will still be the sole processor for the first half of the year. In particular, sometime between now and the end of the first half, clock speed should boost to 866MHz and eventually 900MHz.

Also during the first half a second chipset will be available. On the high end, the 820 chipset with RDRAM will be offered. For the consumer who wants to stay with SDRAM, Intel plans to release the 815 chipset. 815 will essentially replace BX as the mainstream chipset for Intel.

For the second half of 2000, Intel plans to release their 1GHz Pentium III in addition to Willamette.

As we mentioned earlier, Willamette is a brand new 7th generation design. Although no official clock speed was announced, speeds in excess of 1GHz should certainly be assumed. Intel has used thousands of PC's to reveal any bugs in the processor and has had first silicon for about a month.

Due to the radically new architecture, a new chipset will be necessary. Yu officially revealed Willamette's chipset, codenamed "Tehama".

For the Pentium III, two new chipsets were also listed for the second half of 2000: "Camino 2" and "Solano 2." While specific details of both chipsets weren't revealed, it's widely reported that both will feature a new ICH-2 controller hub that supports the upcoming ATA-100 interface.

Intel executives also stated that Tehama would feature a dual-channel RAMBUS interface with no plans for SDRAM support. (Including DDR SDRAM, which Intel will use exclusively in servers)

Clock speeds for Willamette launch, like Timna, were not announced; Yu did state that during 2000 "hundreds of thousands" of Willamette processors would ship, followed by millions in 2001.

Since the processor demonstrated was running at 1.5GHz many probably assume this will be the speed at launch. But is this likely?