Onze Russische kameraden van iXBT hebben hun maandelijkse hardware nieuws overzicht online gezet, met daarin een samenvatting van de onwikkelingen die er de afgelopen maand op processor, geheugen, video en storage gebied plaats vonden. Hier een quote over de Willamette presentatie op 't Intel Developer Forum:
Willamette planned for this October has become a real sensation of IDF carried out in mid February. Certainly! Just take a look at the chip's clock frequency: 1.5GHz! Despite 1GHz chips shown at ISSCC, which at first seemed the top of the today's technology, 1.5GHz value had an unbelievably impressive effect on the public. But as soon as you found out what had been undertaken to achieve this speed, you would hardly be less impressed: take for instance a 20-stage pipeline or a significantly slower FPU compared to that of Pentium III.No wonder that the CPU performance increases only due to higher clock frequency, as we can see from the first chip samples. Coppermine and Willamette working at the same clock frequency are absolutely equal in integer operations and differ by only 5% in floating point operations (Willamette proves 5% faster than Coppermine). However, we can't but hope that when Willamette is finally launched, software developers will start applying SSE2 instructions set, which is really capable of using the processor's entire potential.
iXBT schrijft trouwens dat ServerWorks een Willamette chipset met DDR support op de planning heeft staan.
