Looking back at 2000 - Part 1: CPUs, Chipsets, Motherboards

Closing out the Year: DDR and Pentium 4 provide nothing

The final months of the year 2000 brought us the long sought after DDR chipsets for the Athlon platform.  First with AMD's own 760 solution and then ALi's MAGiK1.  The initial encounters were impressive, boasting a 10% performance increase in today's applications with a promise of even more as applications get even more bandwidth intensive. 

However, as we soon discovered, the performance boost was not all due to DDR SDRAM, rather a good chunk of it was due to the 133MHz DDR FSB which VIA's KT133A chipset provided sans the added cost of DDR SDRAM.

The Pentium 4 also made its official debut in November of 2000, however it was subject to extremely harsh criticism across all forms of media.  For today's applications and uses, the Pentium 4 is just not worth it. 

What do these two items have in common?  They don't offer any real benefits for the user today however both technologies could have promising futures, we'll have to keep an eye on 2001 to see if one, both or neither come out on top.