If Intel really does find itself in a tough price/performance battle for the CPU market, rambus will be on hold or dead - at least in PCs. But your estimates are perfectly valid, even, as you say, conservative, for a scenario in which AMD collapses and no one buys them and keeps their technology going.
time will tell..which of us is correct.
want to bet a beer?
Rambus uses too much power and generates too much heat to use in a laptop.
that problem was resolved several months ago. you will see rambus in laptops when coppermine is released this year.
Timna is designed for the entry level market, the most price concious market. This is the last chip you would want to burden with significantly more expensive memory.
yes, i agree...that is exactly my point. as granularity(whatever that is) increases to 256m and beyond, sdram is more expensive. or as i say, rdram is cheaper particularly in the low-end. here is a technical explanation from the news release.
clip...
"It makes sense for the Timna to use RDRAM," said
Dean McCarron, principal of
market watcher Mercury Research (Scottsdale, Ariz.). Using integrated RDRAM in the
low-cost PC can lower overall
memory costs, since it takes less memory to deliver adequate performance.
"One of the reasons Intel went with RDRAM is that the memory controller is only 30 pins
per channel," said one major
Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer. "That's much easier to move onto the CPU silicon
than the standard SDRAM
memory controller."
Another advantage is that you can increase bandwidth with a fairly low rise in pin count.
"With one channel at 30 pins,
you get 1.6 Gbytes of bandwidth," said an engineer for another Taiwanese motherboard
maker. "With 60 pins you get
3.2 Gbytes and with 90 pins you get 5.4 Gbytes, and so on."
While Intel's schedule calls for rolling out Timna in the third quarter of next year,
McCarron said it could take an
additional six months for value-segment PC makers to begin the switch from SDRAMs to
Direct Rambus. Intel may
have to delay Timna to early 2001, he said.
"Ultimately, RDRAM will migrate down to this level of the market," McCarron added.
|
