[CoSD]Headbanger schrijft: "Om te voorkomen dat er mensen gaan zeuren dat er veel te veel AMD-nieuws op Tweakers.net staat (en wij dus anti-Intel zijn) komt hier dus wat Intel-nieuws, en wel over de Timna. The Register heeft een artikeltje hierover geschreven. Hieronder wat belangrijke en/of opmerkelijke quotes."
De Timna is Intel's nieuwe system-on-a-chip gevalletje. The Register schrijft dat het gerucht de ronde doet op Computex dat de Timna helemaal niet zou uitkomen. Het is al ver uitgesteld door de problemen met de Memory Translator Hub, en volgens The Register zou er nu te veel concurrentie voor de Timna zijn:
Because the word on the Computex street is that Timna, now officially delayed until Q1 next year, is a duck that may not hatch, never mind get round to flying.
And, those observers point out, there's more than one reason why Intel may well draw a veil over the whole Timna exercise.
First, competitive forces from both inside and outside Intel militate against Timna, in the shape of AMD's Duron and Via's bastard-creation, the Cyrix III. Although the latter is currently vastly overpriced, most think that if Via continues to hawk this CPU, which has, of course, an IDT WinChip core, rather than a Cyrix core, it will be sold into cheapo-cheapo markets at prices closer to red cents than to greenbacks.
The Timna Duck also competes against Intel's traditional Celeron family inside. Pressure from AMD in the shape of the Duron will result in Intel continuing to use its marketing muscle to drive down the price of Celerons and increase the clock speed, as roadmaps we have seen already demonstrate.
As Gigabyte's mobo clearly showed, Timna arrives in an S-370S configuration, and sources close to Intel's plans say that engineers are finding it extremely hard to build the dense mass of graphics and audio transistors into a package that is both cheap and efficient.
There are more serious technical problems for Timna too, and those are related to the now infamous memory translator hub (MTH) technology that has caused Intel so much grief over the last 18 months.
The technical difficulties to overcome with the MTH clearly remain, according to the documents we saw, but Intel, on the face of it at least, appears to want to ignore their conclusions. The most recent roadmaps we have seen show not only Timna slated for Q1 next year, but, later in the year, a Timna Plus.