Tench - RE: "<Intel will also release an additional chip with Camino that will
allow standard memory to be used.>
<Looks like even Intel is expecting RDRAM to be further
DELAYED.>
I don't see how the first statement leads to the second. Intel already
had that chip designed and ready for June launch, before the
three-month Camino delay. Seems to me that because of the delay,
the need for such an RDRAM-to-SDRAM bridge will have been
reduced somewhat because the RDRAM manufacturers have an
additional three months to ramp up RDRAM production."
The way I see it, why would Intel waste time and money to come up with a second, crippled Camino unless one of the things Camino was supposed to utilize isn't available. It's not like this crippled Camino is going to go into the "low-cost" performance PC market because there is no such market.
Doesn't this crippled Camino chipset (CCC), which can run SDRAM, completely negate the point of Camino??? Isn't Camino w/RDRAM supposed to be the chip that helps reduce the bottleneck in the system? At Tom's site, Tom has a review (http://www6.tomshardware.com/releases/99q2/990601/index.html) of the Via 133MHz bus-compatible chipset and he says this:
"However, since Camino will also bring us AGP4x, offering an AGP-peak-bandwidth of about 1 GB/s, more memory bandwidth is needed to feed AGP 4x properly. The current peak-bandwidth of PC100 SDRAM is just about 800 MB/s, which is even less than the AGP 4x-bandwidth, so that AGP 4x wouldn't make much sense running on a platform based on the current memory technology."
So, unless Intel stabs Rambus in the back and gives PC133 the green light, there will be no point of AGP4X w/the CCC.
This means that if the CCC comes out with Coppermine and if Intel doesn't go to PC133, the only new thing the semi-REAL PIII (the current one is a place holder, the full Coppermine and Camino is the REAL deal IMO) will bring to the table is the on-chip cache. RDRAM won't be there, AGP4X will be pointless, and the bus will still be 100MHz.
I can't wait to see how all this turns out! |
