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Wave Goodbye to 2000

Toronto Star Fast Forward column for December 28, 2000

Copyright ©, Myles White, 2000

When I wrote last year's wrap-up column for 1999, I noted with amazement that Intel had just released an 800 MHz version of the Pentium III and that AMD was still behind, at least in raw internal processor speed with its 750 MHz Athlon. I think it's illustrative of what I think is biggest computer hardware story of 2000 that both companies have nearly doubled these speeds in the past year.

Intel's Pentium 4 has two versions at 1.4 and 1.5 GigaHertz (GHz), or if you prefer, 1,400 and 1,500 MHz. AMD's Mustang version of the Athlon is up to 1.2 GHz, but some benchmark test results that are starting to filter out of various places strongly suggest that, depending on the test that's run and the software technology that's tested, it's a tossup as to which company's processor is faster.

This was also the year that marketing triumphed over absolute truth in the processor battles. It's reminiscent of the old phrase that. "The first casualty of war is truth." And, up until recently, I'll have to confess that I was sucked into propaganda just like most of my colleagues.

What I'm talking about here, of course, is the teensy fib we've been told about the speed of the so-called "Front-Side Bus" (FSB) - the data pathway that connects the processor to main system memory, the processor's support chipset, the computer's Basic In/Out System (the BIOS that acts as a combination traffic manager and map), and the graphics controller's bus. The processor's internal speed (the numbers we're quoted such as 800 MHz, 1.4 GHz and so on) is always a multiple of the front-side bus speed and the FSB speed is also a gauge of how quickly data gets to where it can do you some good after it has left the processor.

AMD started the fudge, but Intel has kept it up.

Here Come Da Fudge...

We've been told that the Athlons use either a 200 MHz or 266 MHz front-side bus, while the Pentium 4 uses a 400 MHz FSB. In past columns, I've likened the different speeds of FSB (66 MHz for Celeron, 100 or 133 for Pentium II, 200 or 266 for Athlon and 400 for Pentium 4) to lanes of a freeway, saying that it doesn't matter what's going on inside the vehicles; if all start at the same time, someone is going to get to work first.

Now I've had to come up with a different analogy, because there is no front-side bus that operates faster than 133 MHz. 

Gotcha.

Instead, AMD does what has become called "double-pumping," sending twice as much data along the bus in each clock cycle. Intel has fired back with what is being called "quad-pumping," sending four times as much data with each cycle.

So, here's the new analogy: Imagine that you're standing at a level crossing with three tracks, watching some very special, high-speed trains passing you. If you watch the 66 MHz track used by the Celeron, 66 million train cars would pass your vantage point each second. If it were a track for some Pentium III's, the original Athlon (formerly "K7" then "Thunderbird), or the new Pentium 4, those trains would be whipping by at a rate of 100 million cars each second. For newer Pentium III or the newest Athlon (formerly code-named "Mustang"), the rate would be 133 million cars per second.

However, on the Athlon trains the cars would be double-deckers. There'd have to be some pretty high bridges for the Pentium 4 trains, because those cars would be quadruple-deckers.

So what? Well, it begins to explain why in some tests the "slower" 1.2 GHz Athlon Mustang is whipping the "faster" Pentium 4. Although the Athlon Mustang pumps half as much data as the Pentium 4 does along its front-side bus, the Athlon-based system does it 30 per cent faster. This isn't the whole story, of course, but I think you're beginning to get the idea that just possibly AMD's marketing geniuses may have wound up shooting themselves in the foot.

Other Trends

Some other noteworthy hardware advances in 2000 deserve mention because I suspect they indicate trends for the future. Two-megapixel digital cameras were only just beginning to appear in late 1999, but current leading-edge models have already surpassed three million pixels. I'm hearing that the digital camera industry feels it will be able to compete with the visual quality of film by the time they can manage to produce an eight megapixel picture - and that the day isn't far off when they'll manage it.

CD-RW (Compact Disk ReWriteable) drive speeds and reliability are up this year. While 32X playback, 12X write, and 8X re-write are now fairly common, I've begun to see models appear that exceed all of these speeds. What we need now is reliable software and blank discs that can keep up.

The graphics controller wars lost a combatant this year when Diamond Multimedia/S3 announced it was getting out of the graphics controller business this past fall. The announcement also said the company would continue to support products already in existence, but that there wouldn't be any more new ones.

In the meantime, I've pulled ATI's $460+ All-In-Wonder RADEON graphics controller out of my system. Although initially it appeared to work properly, I later discovered it was causing at least one of my often-used programs (a programmer's editor named Edit Plus) to lock up and it also produced some very strange results in Corel's Ventura 8 - another application I use often. So far, the company hasn't provided an explanation or a driver update, so the card will stay on the shelf until it does.

What's hot this year? Just about anything from nVidia, which is quickly becoming the brand of choice for many power users.

The memory wars began in earnest this year, too. Depending on the processor you chose and the support chipset that came with it, a new PC in the latter half of 2000 came equipped with either synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM), double data-rate SDRAM (DDR SDRAM), or Intel's memory type of preference, direct RAMbus DRAM (DRDRAM). I've listed them in order, from least to most expensive when it comes to buying more. See next week's column to find out which I believe will win.

Of course, the bad news is that the preferred amount of memory for a new PC has gone up, too. Most analysts now consider 64 MB of memory to be the practical least amount, for 128 MB to represent the preferred least amount, and for 256 to 512 MB to be what professional and power users will need for happiness.

The better news is that both hard drive capacities and transfer rates have gone up while the cost per megabyte (or gigabyte) has continued to come down.

Century's Final Notes

The ink-jet printer market got a little more exciting this year when Hewlett Packard introduced automatic duplexing (printing on both sides of the paper) in its PhotoSmart 1218 and DeskJet 990Cse printers. Both models ship with a duplexer that fits neatly and easily into the back of the printer, making duplex printing as easy as a mouse-click. I'd expect the other manufactures to follow suit pretty quickly, but for now, HP has an open field with this technology (yes, I know duplexers have been available for high-end lasers for years, but this introduction into the ink-jet market is affordable.

The other news that arrived this year came in PC Magazine's November 21 edition, when the publication did a comprehensive test of the cost of ownership of a number of current ink-jet printers. Based on a theoretical small business printing 25 monochrome and 25 colour pages per week - and including the cost of the printer, replacement ink cartridges, and other consumables such as print heads - PC Labs reported something I'd suspected for some time: The least expensive printers cost the most to operate. 

Total cost estimated over a three-year period ranged from just over $750 US for one of the more expensive models, an Epson Stylus Color 980 to over $2,800 (US) for the least expensive model, Lexmark's Z32. Click on the link above to check out their report before you go shopping.

Next week: the new Millennium finally arrives officially, and we'll take a look at what it has to offer.

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