Intels New Blessings for the PC and More ...

Introduction

Intel had a big day on April 15, 1998. The release of a new chipset, a new technology and 3 new CPUs to go with it are more than any computer company ever announced in one day. The news are supposed to benefit pretty much any of us, the performance freak as well as the budget plagued PC user.

My article 'The Bus Speed Guide , dated back from November '96, already showed that the 'front side bus' can have a very important impact on overall system performance, so now that we've eventually reached 100 MHz we wonder how much it's going to improve our life with the PC. I already mentioned it almost 12 months ago, 100 MHz 'front side bus' won't give Pentium II systems much of a performance improve, but the story looks a lot different in the Socket 7 field as well as for Intel's new Celeron CPU. CPUs that either havn't got a L2 cache at all or CPUs that have a L2 cache running at the same speed as the 'front side bus' can benefit quite considerably from the faster 'front side bus'. Socket 7 will have its first official '100 MHz' CPU pretty soon, brought to Earth by AMD and listening to the name 'AMD K6 3D'. The so called 'Super7' motherboards that are supposed to run at 100 MHz front side bus are still a wonderful tool for giving you gastritis or severe headaches up to violent thoughts against the manufacturers or even yourself, but after wasting some serious time with several great products I finally succeeded in running my K6 3D (which I've now already got for about 8 weeks, ain't it sad?) in a motherboard at this wonderful 100 MHz front side bus without permanent crashing. To make the story more interesting I ran the Pentium MMX as well as the 6x86MX in this motherboard as well.

You can read all the details in my article '100 MHz Front Side Bus - What's the Beef ?

You will find all about the sandpits as well as Celeron's parents in my article 'CPU Performance from Socket 7 to Slot 1 '.

People who are interested in Socket 7 have heard a lot about all the glorious 'Super7' chipsets, alas none of us has really seen much of them. You certainly remember Abit's courageous announcement of their Super7 board with ALI's Aladdin V chipset some 6 weeks ago. No board is available and the one I've got never ever spoke to me at all. This is not Abit's fault however, ALI has still not gotten its act together with the Aladdin V. Motherboard manufacturers are currently waiting for chip revision 'F' !!! This means that after 5 revisions the Aladdin V is still not bug free yet. Let's hope that revision 'F' will be it. VIA announced their 'mVP3' Super7 chipset with quite a bit of noise also more than a month ago, it's just strange that there are simply no boards available. I have to be nice with VIA though, their reference mVP3 board was the only one that ran the 100 MHz 'front side bus' stable enough for me to benchmark with it. SiS has got their 5591/2 chipset out for quite a while, but the guys at SiS seem still not to be decided if this chipset will do 100 MHz bus or not. I asked several SiS officials at Comdex and Cebit and the answer was 'I don't know'. Hm. Well, the 5591 based boards I've tested all ran very good at 66, 75 and 83 MHz, however 100 MHz were only good for the above mentioned headache, regardless which RAM I used.

This brings me to the next important news. Will buying a BX or Super7 board require new SDRAM? Yes, most likely it will!!! The baby is called 'PC100' spec and was brought to life by Intel. Intel defined what it expects of SDRAM that is supposed to run 100 MHz bus, but still not all PC100 SDRAMs run in all BX boards. c't Magazine has an interesting article about PC100 in their issue number 8, but for those of you who can't get or read c't Magazine I'll write my very own article including compatibility tests with as many SDRAM types I can get.