Looking back at 2000 - Part 1: CPUs, Chipsets, Motherboards

Computex Awaits

At the last major show, Fall Comdex 1999, Intel 820 based motherboards were everywhere and the Athlon platform was a rare presence on the floor.  By the time Computex 2000 came around in June, things had changed dramatically.  Before we get to the obvious of what made it and what didn't on the show floor, there were a couple of announcements that occurred just before the show began.

On AMD's side, the launch of the third Athlon core since the introduction of the processor back in August 1999.  That core being the Thunderbird which offered a full speed, on-die 256KB L2 cache, allowing the Athlon to scale to its full potential as it would increase in clock speed.  This also gave the Athlon virtually identical performance to the Pentium III on a clock for clock basis. 

Intel had answered the pleas of their many customers and had finally launched a successor to the 2-year-old BX chipset.  The i815 offered PC133 SDRAM and 133MHz FSB support in addition to ATA/66 and AGP 4X compliance.  The only downside being that the i815 featured an often unused integrated graphics core in addition to its external AGP 4X slot. 

With those two announcements Computex was underway.  Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers were very happy with Intel's launch of the 815 chipset as it would finally allow them to push a line of motherboards based on Intel chipsets that they could actually sell.  The i815's launch definitely came too late and by this time Intel had already lost a considerable amount of the market to VIA, however it's better late than never and the i815 still turned out to be quite a hit. 

We saw i815 boards everywhere in addition to Socket-A motherboards for AMD's recently announced Athlon using the Thunderbird core.  What we didn't see were many i820 motherboards that crowded the floor at Comdex just 7 months earlier. 

The market had seen and rejected RDRAM as a memory solution; hence the failure of the i820 chipset, however there was still a demand for a higher bandwidth memory technology.  Double Data Rate (DDR) SDRAM was plastered all over the Computex floor courtesy of VIA, but there were no demos of any VIA DDR based solutions at Computex.

Instead, ALi, a company we had heard very little from presented a DDR solution for the Socket-A platform that they would have available before the year's end.  While ALi didn't have the time to make a major impact in 2000, it will be interesting to see if they do stand a chance in 2001.

In another return from the shadows, SiS announced their 730S chipset, a value PC segment solution for the Socket-A platform.  This foreshadowed the release and the tragic flaw of the next major announcement in June.