CPU Rollout
So the 400Mhz chip was released… What’s next for Intel? Here’s a summary of what’s in the works. A 1Ghz chip… mmmm… All names are codenames.
ABC – The next round of Pentium IIs. However they will run on Slot 2 montherboards which have Level 2 caches that run at the 100Mhz Bus speed. They should debut at 400 and 450Mhz speeds. They can hold up to 2 Megs of L2 Cache. Should shipi n 3 months.
Mendocino – This is a Celeron-class chip which has an L2 cache on the actual silicon. The present Celeron model has no L2 cache. It should ship in the third quarter, 1998.
Katmai – It should debut in early-1999 at the 500Mhz mark. It’ll support MMX2, version 2 of the original MMX series. It may also come later on with a 200Mhz data bus (which’ll need new RDRAM – Rambus Dynamic RAM).
Geyserville – Due to be introduced in the 2nd quarter of next year, it’s a mobile version of the Katmai which will feature power saving in the form of variable speed settings (350Mhz on battery power, 450Mhz on AC power).
Colfax – Motherboard design incorporating a Pentium II processor and 2X AGP, support for RDRAM, have a 100Mhz bus, and the 440BX chipset.
Merced – Expected to start at speeds of 600Mhz, potentially reaching 1000Mhz, due late 1999. It’s a 64-bit chip, and also is based on a totally new design (that is, not based on x86 CPU architecture). Because of this, current OSes will not support Merced – you probably won’t be able to run Win NT 5 with it.
McKinley – Fast. The second-generation Merced should debut at 1 Gigahertz. Whoa. And it’s only around 3 years away. That’s a clock speed 30 times faster (in reality, even more than that) than my old 486-33DX, well within the space of a decade.
There ya go. Now I’m off to watch Trek. Tonight’s episode is “Accession”.
12:15am (GMT +10.00) tomorrow 
