Marketing Spiel Causes a Stir

One of the big stories this weekend in hardware has been a set of benchmark graphs plotting the Pentium 4 processor against AMD's 1.2GHz DDR-based solution. The figures, available at this website, are based on a speech given recently, by Paul Otellini, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, where he claimed that the Pentium 4 will offer a performance boost of up to 25 percent in MP3 audio encoding, 50 percent in video encoding, and 44 percent in video games such as Quake III Arena, over a 1GHz Pentium III, the highest currently available from Intel today. His words were borrowed, somewhat naively perhaps, from an IDG report released on Thursday. The claims remain to be confirmed, but in the meantime, rival chipmaker and motherboard chipset manufacturer AMD are facing a somewhat difficult situation ahead of the release of its 760 chipset. As we reported last week, the 760 (a DDR-based chipset) is supposed to debut in this country on Gigabyte's GA-7DX motherboard, but nobody, not even Dabs.com, who frequently manage to scrounge stock before anyone else, seems to have any idea where it is. Their Gigabyte products page, just like everyone else's carries no mention of the GA-7DX. It is now being reported by technology website RealWorldTech, that the 760 has been subject to a new revision which irons out heat problems and issues with AGP 4x. The new revision is now due on November 6th, today, but the question of when anyone will actually be able to buy it still remains unanswered. After a week that subjected Intel to all sorts of criticism, from gossip about its RAMBUS dealings to skepticism about the Pentium 4's performance from a leading European OEM, things aren't looking quite so bleak, and AMD may have a few questions to answer of its own. Related Feature - AMD 760 chipset; good news for Frenchies