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• AMD swung back with the "Hammer" and has its old archenemy Intel with its P4 (Extreme) in its sights. After all, for x86 CPUs, the market leader stole an important share of the market from the former upstart AMD, especially in the past two quarters. At the moment, the standings are 15.7 percent (AMD) to 82.5 percent (Intel), with the remaining 1.8 percent divided among the marginal actors VIA and Transmeta. x86 CPUs Market Share Profit Margin Intel 82.5% 51 bis 54% AMD 15.7% loss VIA 1% no information Transmeta 0.8% loss The most important facts about the Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX-51 have been known for a long time from the workstation/server version of the Opteron (see article: Duel of the Elephants: AMD Hammer vs. Intel Xeon). The actual chief attraction of the Athlon 64 is that it was able to smooth out the bumps in the conversion from 32 bit to 64 bit software in this mass market of millions. At the same time, Apple laid claim that with the G5 model, it would offer the world's most powerful desktop system. Apparently there are users who will believe these kinds of claims. Whatever - at least the G5 also has 64 bit support with regard to the software. Nevertheless, there is still no final operating system available for it. Other 64 bitters worth mentioning are the Alpha 21364 (1150 MHz), IBM's PowerPC (1700 MHz), Intel's Itanium 2 (1500 MHz) and, last but not least, Sun's UltraSparc III Cu (1200 MHz). Compared to the CPUs mentioned, which are only used in professional 64 bit environments, the Athlon 64 is the first CPU that could revolutionize the desktop market and thereby the mass market as well.

• Transmeta introduces Crusoe

  After more than fours years of secrecy Transmeta finally let the cat - or rather the chip - out of the bag on January 19, 2000. At the elegant Villa Montalvo in Saratoga the company introduced the first two processors of the Crusoe family, processors targeted at mobile Internet applications that will revolutionize the field of mobile computing - at least according to Transmeta. The company certainly took a new approach to processor design by creating a software-based chip that was specifically developed for combining PC compatibility with performance and low power consumption. It consists of a hardware engine that is logically surrounded by a software layer with the engine being a 128 bit VLIW (very long instruction word) CPU capable of executing up to four operations in each clock cycle. The VLIW's native instruction set bears no resemblance to the x86 instruction set, but the software layer gives x86 programs the impression that they are running on x86 hardware. Transmeta calls this software layer Code Morphing software because it dynamically morphs x86 instructions into VLIW instructions. In the underlying technology the Transmeta's designers have decoupled the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) from the processor hardware which allows this hardware to be very different from a conventional x86 implementation. One advantage is that the hardware can be changed radically without affecting legacy x86 software. Each new CPU design only requires modifying the Code Morphing software to translate x86 instructions to the CPU's native instruction set. Fundamentally the Code Morphing software is a dynamic translation system, a program that compiles instructions for an instruction set architecture. It is the only program written directly for the VLIW engine, resides in a ROM and is the first program to start when the processor boots. Even though the chip is able to run any x86 code it does not support SIMD - yet. 'We are working on it', said Transmeta's engineering team at the press conference, 'if we implemented it right now SIMD would consume too much power.'

• All DQ6 type motherboards carry an array of 12 voltage regulators. This decreases total efficiency, but ensures a stable voltage supply at all times. We found six phases to be a good number, but Gigabyte still goes for the maximum. Since it regularly reaches good overclocking results with its top motherboards, the strategy can't be wrong. Gigabyte is showing off a very large number of products. The GA-X38T-DQ6 is the X38 motherboard sample that is going to support DDR3 memory. The interesting part is its voltage regulator array, which consists of 12 phases. So does the GA-M790-DQ6, which will be the new top model in the Socket AM2 product line for Athlon X2 and Phenom X2/X4 processors. MSI: Back To Its Roots MSI's Circu-Pipe design offers a larger surface and works well according to our first test results. It looks funny, though... After years of drought MSI finally is doing better. The firm isn't losing money anymore, and is focusing on what it does best: motherboards, graphics cards, notebooks and other components. My Style Inside may not disappear, but MSI realized that reaching the brave new consumer electronics world is more difficult than it had expected. The Teraflop Flip: Graphics Go Super-Computing There are some major changes for super-computing on the horizon, involving AMD, Intel and Nvidia. However, the scope of how these changes will occur is still under discussion, as well as development. AMD's Radeon HD 2900XT can easily calculate 475 billion floating point operations per second (GFLOPS). CrossFire, and with a little overclocking, has yielded over one trillion FLOPS or 1 TeraFLOP (TFLOP) - typically this level can only be reached by expensive super-computers. Nvidia has a similar approach to super-computing using its G80 processor inside the GeForce 8800 series graphics cards. Deviating from traditional graphics, Nvidia is expected to make an announcement about a new utilization of this technology in combination with CUDA - the company's C compiling software - for combined GPU and CPU computing. There is also talk of Intel's approach using its special execution x86 architecture with graphics functionality, codenamed "Larrabee." Both veins of super-computing development are not without their theoretical pitfalls, as GPUs are not as deep as CPUs, which refers to the complexity of dynamic branching, and highly dynamic executions will not process as quickly as on a CPU. The opposite is true for GPUs, which are very wide yet shallow calculators. If they have a lot of similar tasks to get done and don't require a lot of branching, a GPU will outperform a CPU. While we wait pondering the advantages and limitations, new hardware is currently being "taped out", which could move development in a whole new direction. We shall have to wait and see what happens.