Yeah, there is something brewing in the graphics industry, but I'm not sure if it's real, or mostly hype... kinda like the CPU industry. Too bad really, and it makes talking about it all the harder. Times have really slowed down, with the recession and it being the slow second quarter. Anandtech is filled mostly with priceguides right now, and it seems that Tom's is spending time covering weird technologies and such stuff, since there's nothing substancial to talk about. What we need is a leaked white paper, or something more concrete than the companies PR departments and "he said, she said" rumors that have been flying around.
Ever notice how many of these companies are being very tight-lipped? I mean, AMD is tooting the Hammer horn, but with very few details. Beyond that, nothing is known, officially, about the NV30; the R300, while more was made public, has no indication of specs, besides that the guy who does Doom III (can't remember anything more than JC) said that it works better, at the time of E3, than the NV30. The Parhelia flopped, though Maxtor seems to be unconcerned. The PL10 is showing dismal results in workstation benchmarks, though 3DLabs claims that it's because Nvidia has benchmark tweaks in their drivers, as well as the fact that the PL10 drivers were somewhere between alpha and beta stage.
The CPU front is just as boring, with the T-bred sucking it up at OC'ing, and the P4 distancing itself, quickly, I might add, from anything AMD can offer, unless you look only at price. The Barton is nothing more than adding 256KB of L2 cache to the core, which may give nothing more than a 5% increase in performance. Nothing looms for the P4 until Prescott, who's debut range from the end of Q1 all the way to Christmas time of 2003. Most sites I've read seem to say that it will all depend on two things: the condition of the market (I'm thinking this has more to do with demand in general and the economy) and the level of sucess that the Hammer has. If the Hammer flops, I'd say that Intel will be content to sit back and wait until they can get everything in place for the Prescott (the P5, possibly). But, if the Hammer succeeds beyond anything AMD or Intel imagined, I'd say that the Prescott will be pushed out the door as quickly as possible, in order to prevent the damage to marketshare that a successful Hammer would inflict on Intel. Also, I s'pose, the Prescott could be hampered by the .09µ process, much as the T-bred was, in terms of being able to release it on time. That's where the Hammer has an advantage, in that it will be debuted on .13µ, so there <i>shouldn't</i> be any layout problems like the T-bred.
And then there is nothing to revolutionary about the chipsets or motherboards being released between now and the Hammer, for either platform. It's all just rehashing the same ol' stuff. Rather depressing. I don't remember things being this boring last summer. In fact, this is the worst set of doldrums I've seen in my 2 years of following the computer industry. At least there are good games coming out, or I'd be completely depressed.
-SammyBoy
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