Intel's 2003 roadmap

[Demigod]

With Intel taking firm control of the latter part of 2002 here's a glimpse of their roadmap for the year of 2003.

First the bad news. Do not expect insanely fast processors coming from Intel this year, nor any significant price drops. A 3.2 Ghz P4 won't become a reality until the second quarter and the year will probably close out at about ~3.4 Ghz or so. That's only about a 10% improvement over the current top processor, the Pentium 4 3.06 Ghz. With such low speed increments don't expect prices to fall much either.

Now the good news. Intel will be improving upon their slower processors with newer features. They will be arming the Pentium 4 Northwood from 2.4 Ghz with an 800 Mhz FSB and Hyer-Threading support. The Springdale chipset will also debut this year in 4 versions. The high-end Springdale-PE chipset will support an 800 Mhz FSB and dual-channel DDR333 and DDR400. The Prescott may also debut at around the second quarter as well with 1 MB L2 cache and 90 nm process but the processor won't be fully fledged until 2004.

For you AMD fans 2003 will put AMD in a good position to comeback with their Athlon 64 processor, provided they can get it out. The Hammer is expected to outperform the Athlon XP by about 20% and should debut at no lower than 1.6 Ghz (some say over 2 Ghz but it's unspeculated). The Hammer should be a formidable match for the Pentium 4 Northwood, although I doubt it'll be able to tackle the Prescott.

[Zapages]

Prescott = Pentium 5*I think because PC Magazine has something about it for Quater 3 for 2003.