The year 2003 in processor form

By Alun Williams

Posted on 23 Dec 2003 at 17:08

May and June

Following on from Canterwood came the Springdale chipset, launched with a 3.2GHz P4 in May -
Intel's Springdale chipset springs into life . And June promptly saw mobile processors (Mobile Pentium 4s) passing the 3GHz barrier.

The month of June also saw Intel reveal more details of its futuristic plans for 3D transistor design. The biggest news, however, was the launch of Itanium 2, Intel's second generation version of its 64-bit server. AMD, meanwhile, had been busy revving up new notebook engines, including the Barton-based Athlon 2800+ XP-M processor.

July and August

July and August saw mixed news for AMD. On the one hand Opterons were increasingly used for supercomputers (AMD Opterons to power Chinese supercomputer and AMD unveils an Opteron fit for a supercomputer, but on the financial side of things profitability stayed out of reach for the company.

AMD also announced that henceforth its Opteron would shadow Intel Xeon pricing. And Sun promised native Java technology support for the 64-bit Opteron, too.

The branding programme for AMD 64-bit computing was also launched, ahead of the unveiling of the Athlon 64 processor.

August also saw rival chip-maker Transmeta unveil its power-saving mobile Efficeon processor. Like AMD, it attacked the 'mega-hertz myth', claiming its eight instructions per clock cycle outperforms its predecessor by 50 per cent in 'typical real-world applications'. For multimedia applications, Transmeta claimed a performance gain of 80 per cent.

According to Dr. Matthew R. Perry, president and CEO, Transmeta Corporation: 'Efficient computing is what the mobile market is demanding - uncompromising application performance, extended battery life, low heat, appealing ergonomic designs, ultra-small form factors, fully integrated functionality, and more dependable products with fewer components. Naturally, all of this has to come at an appealing price point.'

September

In September, Intel reserved its biggest news for the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose. The event began with Intel showcasing virtual hardware (using virtual machines within processors, so that independent software environments can co-exist) and the unveiling of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (also known as the Athlon 64 spoiler) as part of its vision for home-based computing.

The snappily-titled 'Pentium 4 with Hyper Threading technology Extreme Edition' (P4 HT EE) would initially run at 3.2GHz and have 2MB of level 3 cache. You can read about the first benchmark tests here.

For the world of handheld devices, Bulverde was showcased as the next-gen XScale processor and the successor to the Banias processor, the 'Dothan', was also previewed.

There was also a new Centrino chipset and Intel announced Hyper-Threading for its laptop processors (specifically, the Mobile Intel Pentium 4).