Win Smith, Re: "The P4 isn't slow, but it's fat. In the near term, anybody who'd pay $600 for the privilege of running a 2ghz P4, plus being saddled with soon to be obsolete Rambus memory, or else going with Intel's lame SDRAM 845"
Well, in not too long of a time, the Pentium 4 won't be limited to those two memory choices. Rambus already sells in millions of Pentium 4 systems every quarter, and SDRAM will pick up millions more in the low end. When DDR becomes available, I believe it will pick up the rest of the middle. True the Athlon has its price/performance advantage, but I can't imagine that AMD would be selling it for 1/5 of the price that they deserve, if they weren't pressured into that price range by Intel. Small margins doesn't make AMD a company worth investing in right now, but it sure does help them reach record unit volumes.
As for VIA, you think that Intel denies them a license because they want exclusivity in the chipset market. If that were the case, why would they be eager to give licenses to SiS and ALi, both of which have announced DDR chipsets that will probably be available in the fourth quarter? I think that Intel's dispute with VIA is mostly based off of the Pentium 4 bus IP, which VIA has questionable license at this point. There is little evidence to suggest that Intel would refuse VIA a license if they were willing to pay for the rights.
wanna_bmw |
