If
you look at the current technologies then AMD appears to have
stolen a lead on Intel with it’s 64 bit processors. It has
amused many observers to watch Intel play down the significance
of 64 bit processors at the moment. Intel is also claiming that
it also has 64 bit technology built into it’s current chips
but it is currently disabled.
It
is clear to everyone that 64 bit systems will be with us in the
future but it is Microsoft who are causing AMD problems at the
moment. The 64 bit version of windows is not available yet and
so the real gains of 64 bit systems will not become apparent until
it is. Some companies are selling AMD systems with the promise
of an easy upgrade path to 64 bit Windows when it does eventually
become available. As far as I can see it will not a simple upgrade
but complete reinstall of Windows and all of your applications.
You could also find yourself in a similar situation with drivers
for various devices as some people did when Windows XP came along.
A lot of manufacturers did not produce drivers for older equipment,
if Microsoft delays the 64 bit Windows for any length of time
we could see technology move on and people with early 64 bit processors
left with systems that can only be run with 32 bit Windows.
Anyway
back to today the AMD platform looks set to be socket 939 for
high end processors and socket 754 for middle range processors
for the foreseeable future. Intel are moving to socket 775 for
current and future processors.
Along
with new processors comes a whole host of other new support chips
that give us new features. AMD will be using VIA’s K8T890
based motherboards and this will introduce PCI express to AMD
for the first time but it will not support DDR2 memory this will
come in the future. As for Intel they have the Intel 915/G and
925x chipsets available, they both support PCI Express and DDR2
but tests suggest that they currently do not give much advantage
over the older socket 478 chipsets. This should change when the
925Xe chipset is released, this chipset will also support a 1066
Mhz Front Side Bus.
What
else will the future bring for us, well it doesn’t look
like we are going to see current processors go beyond the 4 Ghz
mark because latest roadmap from Intel has killed off anything
beyond 4 Ghz for the Pentium 4 range. This could lead to Intel
moving to a dual core processor running at 3 Ghz which would give
an effective single speed of 5 Ghz . This will require some clever
engineering to overcome the heat problems associated with these
sort of speeds.
Finally
a topic that we have talked about before and that is BTX, the
current board standard is ATX and this is due to be replaced shortly
by a new component layout which will be BTX.
I
will try and bring you more details as and when they become available.
Derek
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