Developments For PCs

Intel are looking to build upon their momentum that built up in 2006 when they made a comeback with the Core 2 Duo desktop CPU, by broadening the range of Core 2 based CPUs available. Early in the year we can expect an E4000 range of Core 2 Duo CPUs based on the Allendale core (currently used for the E6300/6400, 2MB cache) and operating on a 200Mhz (800QDR) FSB. At the top end of the range there will be another quad core available, this one running at 2.4GHz and badged as a Core 2 Quad making it the first non-extreme branded quad core Core 2 CPU. Further developments later in the year are likely to include the migration to a 45nm process which should unlock ever higher speeds, true quad core CPUs (rather than 2 dual cores in a single package) and higher yields from each silicon wafer. By the 2nd half of the year a new budget series of Intel Dual Core CPUs named E2000 is likely, using either the Pentium or Celeron brand, it will be based on the Core 2 Duo Allendale core but will only have 1MB of cache, run on a 200MHz (800QDR) FSB and have the virtualisation, ViiV and vPRO fuctions disabled. Another Intel CPU that is likely to appear at some point in 2007 is a single core version of the Core 2 CPU with 1MB cache, possibly under the Celeron brand.

AMD lost their performance lead in 2006 which they had maintained since the launch of the Athlon 64 in 2003, so in 2007 AMD will be looking to regain thier market position of the most boost for the least juice with an ultra efficient quad core CPU which they are promising will operate within the same power envelope as thier 90nm dual core CPUs, which is made possible thanks to a migration to a 65nm process and some very clever independant core control which slows or halts cores in step with the activity of the computer which has obvious power saving possibilities and exploits AMD’s most advanced platform architecture as each core is independantly connected via hypertransport. These CPUs feature dedicated L1 and L2 caches for each core with a shared L3 cache as well as AMD’s integrated memory controller. Further revisions of the AMD Athlon 64 X2 are also expected, including a version with a shared L3 cache.

nVidia ended 2006 with the release of their GeForce 8800 range of graphics cards which are built to work optimally under Direct X 10 which will be ushered in with the release of Windows Vista. The 8800 high end cards will be joined by new mid and low range cards early this year which going on previous experience of nVidia’s card numbering system are likely to be called the 8600 (mid) and 8300 (low). There will also be mobile variants on these cards labelled as GeForce Go.

ATi will join the DX10 party with their R600 GPU based cards which seem set to set a new record for sheer power consumption in a single GPU graphics card (so much so that it is likely that it will require 2 supplementary PCI-E power connectors). The card will include 64 unified shaders, 32 TMUs & 32 ROPs and 512MB of GDDR4 memory, which on sheer numbers seems secondary to nVidia’s 8800GTX which packs in more unified shaders and more memory, though it’s thought that the ATi may run at a higher clock speed.

There is a possibility that DDR3 memory could be introduced before the end of 2007, but wider adoption before 2008 seems unlikely as the transition to DDR2 has only just become a reality. The advantage of DDR3 memory is speed, the minimum speed will be DDR3-800 with scaling going initially up to DDR3-1333, other advantages include an 8 bit pre-fetch buffer (as opposed to 4 bit in DDR2, 2 bit in DDR) as well as lower power requirements.