For all the “fringe” news bits and anecdotes, visit the Sydney Morning Herald’s site’s Column 8. The link’s in the left column, or for Netscape 3 users, far down the bottom of the page. Netscape doesn’t like Javascript in tables. Grrr.
Not a bad episode for this week; it closes one loose thread (Sisko and him being the Emissary etc.). Wouldn’t it be a sight to see Sisko going on a power trip now he’s seen just what an Emissary can do? >:)
Surely you must’ve heard what happened to “Uncle” Bill. At Comdex ’98, he was giving a demo of the plug ‘n’ play “capabilities” of Win 98… and it crashed on him (blue screen crash). I’ve even got the video file of it :). Luckily, it was a Beta, so he sort of managed to salvage this situation with the comment, “That must be why we’re not shipping Windows 98 yet,” to which his shaken assistant replied, “Absolutely. Absolutely.” I cracked up when I saw the video clip the first time. Windows was detecting the scanner, and when it dumped the assistant (who was doing the talking), to the blue screen, the assistant almost shat himself. Hahaha.
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”.