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January 16, 1999
News
- The big news this week was the dramatic price cuts in
PacBell’s ADSL high-speed Internet service. Ironically, just last week I was
bemoaning the ridiculously high prices of ADSL here in the Bay Area, especially compared
to other areas of the country and, lo and behold, this week the company gave us exactly
what I was hoping for. With the new service, which is available in most parts of the Bay
Area, you can be enjoying up to a 1.5 Mbps Internet connection, including Internet access
charges, for only $49/month, or $39 a month if you use an ISP other than Pac Bell. There
is a $200 installation charge, which includes the cost of a DSL modem and Ethernet card to
plug it into, and those rates are only available if you sign up for a one-year minimum,
but all in all, this is an excellent deal. One of the many benefits of DSL is that it can
use your existing phone lines, so you don’t need to have any new lines installed, and
it won’t interfere with your phone service. In fact, you can make and receive voice
calls while you’re online, so all you really need is a single phone line. Also, in
comparison to cable modems, DSL lines are not shared, so your bandwidth won’t
decrease as other people sign up for the service. We’ll be talking to Don Roe of Pac
Bell a bit later this hour, but in the mean time, if you want to find out if the service
is available in your area, I’ve provided a link to a page on Pac Bell’s site
that lets you type in your area code and phone number prefix to see if you can get it.
Just head over to my This Week’s Links page.
- More Pentium III info was released this week. The chip, which
will be available in 450 and 500 MHz versions when it ships on March 1, uses the same
basic technology, including the Slot 1 connection, as the Pentium II, but it adds 70 new
instructions that are apparently going to be called Streaming SIMD. (SIMD is an acronym
for Single Instructions, Multiple Data, a processing technique that lets you perform the
same operation, or instruction, on multiple bits of data at once). The MMX processor
instructions added to the Pentium line over two years ago also use SIMD, but they were
focused on integer operations. The Streaming SIMD instructions included with the Pentium
III will apparently focus on floating point operations. Some practical benefits that
should result from this include the ability to do high-quality MPEG-2 video decoding in
software, as well as improvements in rendering 3D graphics and better speech recognition.
As I said last week, however, these type of benefits only occur to applications that are
specifically written to take advantage of the instructions. Applications that aren’t
updated to use the instructions will see no benefit whatsoever. Very few applications were
ever really MMX-enhanced and, as a result, that technology had very little real impact in
the market. Aware of the fact, Intel has apparently been working with many software
developers for over a year to make sure they develop apps they take advantage of the new
Streaming SIMD instructions in Pentium III. We shall see.
- In other processor news, AMD this week introduced the fastest
notebook processor (at least in MHz speed) now available: a 333 MHz K6-2. The 333 MHz
version, along with 300 and 266 MHz versions, are the first K6-2 processors specifically
targeted for notebooks. The K6-2 line includes AMD’s 3DNow processor instructions,
which again, like MMX and the Streaming SIMD found in the Pentium III, are only relevant
for applications that are written to take advantage of them. Intel is expected to answer
AMD’s volley with a new line of mobile Pentium II processors, including ones that run
at 366 and 333 MHz, on January 25. In addition, these new mobile Pentium IIs are expected
to offer 256K of L2 cache integrated onto the chip itself, a la the current Celeron
processors for desktops. That same date will also apparently see the introduction of
Celeron processors designed for notebooks as well.
- Packard Bell has some new low-cost computers, including a
$599 model that after the $100 rebate, will cost you $499. The new Packard Bell Multimedia
880 is based around a 300 MHz Cyrix MII processor and includes 32MB of RAM, a 3.2GB hard
drive, 32X CD-ROM, and 56K modem. Other new additions to the line include the $749
Multimedia 910, which features a 333 MHz Cyrix MII, 64MB of memory, and a 6.4GB hard
drive; the Packard Bell Platinum 7800, which retails for $899 and includes a 366-MHz
Celeron; and the Platinum 8300, which features a 400 MHz Celeron, 96MB of RAM, and a 10.2
GB hard drive.
- Dell finally got into the ultrathin subnotebook market this
week with the introduction of the 3.1 pound Latitude LT, which features a silver-colored
magnesium case. With prices starting at $2,299, the 1" thick Latitude LT features a
266 Pentium MMX processor, 11.3" SVGA active matrix screen, 64 MB of RAM, 4.3 GB hard
drive and a 56K modem. Interestingly, the notebook ships with Windows 95 instead of
Windows 98.
- Finally, as I predicted, it looks like power issues will not
be a problem when our computers roll over to January 1, 2000. According to a comprehensive
report released this week to the US Dept. of Energy by the North American Electric
Reliability Council, an organization made of power companies from the US and Canada, the
power industry should meet its goal of being Y2K-ready by June 30th of this
year. In other words, the industry doesn’t predict any power outages as a result of
the Y2K rollover.
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