SOURCES AT A major motherboard
manufacturer have now provided with information which, they claim, explains
why Intel may soon revamp its entire chip strategy.
A while back we reported that
we had heard Intel could well major just on the P4 and Celerons and consign
its Pentium III desktop processor to the chip bin of history.
And before then, we reported
that Intel engineers were embarrassed that dual Tualatins seemed to be totally
outclassing dual Foster Xeons.
Now, according to the mobo maker,
the main reason they are holding back on the launch of desktop Tualatin
processors is that a 1.4GHz Pentium III Tualatin will outperform a Pentium
4 Socket 423 processor running at 1.7GHz.
This, of course, would be vastly
embarrassing for the chip giant, but does show just how excellent Intel's
.13 micron technology is.
Although 478 pin P4s are now
ready, Intel is restraining their release until September and wants to catch
the Microsoft XP wave.
One mobo maker claimed that
a Brookdale 845 chipset using SDRAM will outperform P4s using Rambus RIMMs.
If true, then that's another doh for La Intella, but we'd have thought the
memory bandwidth on the 850 chipset far outclassed anything the 845 could
offer.
