2007 Review/Preview
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Well 2007 is a little more than half over and a lot has changed in the computer world. At the beginning of the year we had a tech of 2007 preview and rumors. Now that the year is half over, we have some products on the shelves, and some still somewhere around their respective companies. We'll now glance over what has hit the shelves, the effect and the quality, how it is affecting the market, and what we have to look forward to the rest of the year.
CPUs
As in 2006, Intel will continue to beat down the struggling AMD. AMD has some major work to do. Their new CPU for 2007 which will be coming out later this year so far doesn't look so revolutionary. They will drop the 64 from their product line; it's a given at this point that all CPUs will be 64 bit capable.
AMD's new naming scheme will be Phenom FX for their top of the line CPUs on the Socket 1207 and AM2. With cache chopped off and slower, it will be called the Phenom x2 or x4 depending on the number of cores. AMD won't kill their ever famous Athlon name; there will be an Athlon X2, basically the same old Athlon 64.
While these may sound like some super fast CPUs, all indications are that this isn't even worth a second look. It appears they will be nowhere as efficient as hoped and clocked lower than AMD's original goals.
AMD is also working on new chipsets too; basically these are just independent clocks for the Northbridge and CPU, for better performance and power savings. While this is a good feature, don't look for it to help by providing any noticeable gains in a user environment. You can't turn a crappy CPU into a great one without a major design changes. Intel tried this with the Prescott and failed; look for AMD to be in a similar boat this year at the very least. The biggest excitement from AMD this year will be the release of a quad core CPU.
Intel's goal is simple: continue riding the Core Duo core and continue to tweak it. Intel's big change for 2007 is the die shrink to 45nm. They have also tweaked the cores some to get ~10% increase, or so it is rumored. I doubt you will see much of a gain.
Intel will boost the Front Side Bus up to 1333MHz to help increase the interaction with the motherboard and also within the cores (remember that the cores on Intel CPUs use the Front Side Bus to talk). Provided there are no setbacks we could see Yorkfield later this year. This is a native quad core with 6 MB cache. These new 45 NM cores will also sport SSE4.
Intel isn't doing anything revolutionary; that was last year. They found a great core, and are keeping to it after the train wrecks from Prescott and Netburst. Many people have been able to overclock the current Core Duo 2s with nice increases in speed. With such a capable CPU with the ability to increase speeds to over 4 GHz on air, why is Intel stalling and releasing them in the 2-3 GHz range? Well they currently are doing VERY well and are constantly beating AMD's CPUs, so why not wait until it comes to a close race, and then turn on the turbo and leave them in the dust again?
Next: Motherboards and Chipsets >>
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