The other big news is that Timna, Intel's processor-to-be that is essentially a Celeron with a built-in MCH, has been cancelled and will not see the light of day. Development of Timna has been halted so we think you can safely say that Timna is gone.

The big deal with Timna was that, by combining the processor with the MCH, you would not need a separate MCH (which costs money) nor would you need to do the difficult motherboard routing between the MCH and processor. This would result in an overall lowering in system cost.

Our sources say Intel has said that their manufacturing scale as well as cost reductions in the general PC industry have, among other things, driven down the overall value platform BOM (bill of materials, a.k.a. the part count and cost). The lowering part counts and therefore costs that high-integration was intended to yield have been seen without Timna. This means that, if Intel were to push Timna, they would be pushing an unneeded part at costs similar to the regular parts.

Time for a little sarcasm. Ladies and gentlemen, this may be a first for Intel. OK, sarcasm off. They are actually paying attention to the needs of their customers as opposed to offering what they think the public needs and letting their customers deal with whatever slack is left. Intel forced RDRAM upon an unhappy industry that wanted to take the easier DDR route, and it ended up biting Intel in the behind. It sounds like somebody at Intel learned a lesson and managed to stop something similar from happening with Timna.

I do want to make something perfectly clear though. In Intel's defense, Timna is great technology, just as RDRAM is. By combining the MCH with a processor, Intel got rid of the front side bus bottleneck. Due to this and a few other enhancements in Timna, it should be able to provide more performance than current Celeron/i810E solutions. But from the look of things, the industry would not benefit from Timna, Intel saw this, and Intel killed Timna because of it.

Is it the humbling of a giant? Is Intel realizing that, in order to stay ahead of AMD and VIA, they are going to have to be more attentive to their customers' needs? Are we opening ourselves up to major criticism by writing this article? We think the answer to all three questions is a resounding, "Yes!"