Speeds and Feeds

Although nonperformance aspects of the PC have been at center stage recently, Intel continues to plan architecture changes that will speed up PCs as well as simplify their connectivity. The dominant PC chip and motherboard maker’s plans quickly become the plans of all PC manufacturers. Below are the technologies for top-of-the-line systems that Intel expects to provide.

 

	Late 1999	Early 2000	Late 2000	Late 2001
Desktop PCs
Processor	600MHz Pentium III	800MHz Pentium III	1GHz Pentium III	IA-32 (Foster)
Memory	100MHz RDRAM	133MHz RDRAM	RDRAM	RDRAM
Internal buses	33MHz PCI, AGP 4X, ATA/66	33MHz PCI wide, AGP 4X, ATA/66	33MHz PCI wide, AGP 4X, new ATA	66MHz PCI wide, NGIO, AGP 4X, new ATA
Ports	PS/2, USB 1.1, serial, AT keyboard, parallel	PS/2, USB 1.1, serial, AT keyboard, parallel, 1394	PS/2, USB 2.0, serial, parallel, 1394	USB 2.0, 1394b
Server PCs
Processor	600MHz Pentium III Xeon	Pentium III Xeon	IA-64 (Merced) or Pentium III Xeon	IA-64 (McKinley) or IA-32 (Foster)
Memory	133MHz RDRAM	133MHz RDRAM	RDRAM	RDRAM
Internal buses	33MHz PCI wide, AGP Pro, ATA/66, SCSI	33MHz PCI wide, AGP Pro, ATA/66, SCSI	33MHz PCI wide, NGIO, AGP Pro, ATA/66, SCSI	66MHz PCI wide, NGIO, AGP Pro, ATA/66

 

Source: Intel presentations at the 1999 Intel Developers Forum.

 

Key
1394: IEEE 1394, also called FireWire, an external peripheral connector.
AGP: Advanced Graphics Port, a variant of the PCI internal slot.
ATA: AT (an old IBM PC model) Attachment, a connector for internal drives.
IA-32, IA-64: Intel Architecture, a new processor design with 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
NGIO: Next-Generation Input/Output, an internal slot (wide indicates a 64-bit version, rather than the standard 32-bit version).
RDRAM: Rambus dynamic RAM, a memory architecture.
SCSI: Small Computer Systems Interface, an internal and external peripheral connector.
SDRAM: Synchronous dynamic RAM, a memory architecture.
USB: Universal Serial Bus, an external peripheral connector.