<the good performance numbers always seem to get leaked>
Yeah right. Remember those previews of K7 (now Athlon) performed by guys who broke AMD's NDA? Those leaks sure weren't good performance numbers. And yet the actual Athlon turned out to be much better in performance than what those early K7 previews made anyone expect.
Same thing with the first Pentium II two years ago. Tom's Hardware Guide ran some tests on the processor some months before its release, and concluded that its performance was so slow, K6 would have beaten it. This drew the negative attention from Intel, obviously. And as it turned out, at its release, Pentium II was faster than what Tom's preview made anyone expect.
Any chance that those "leaks" of DRDRAM's supposed poor performance might be the same old story played over and over again? Hence the need for non-disclosure agreements.
<Will Intel limit coppermine and timna to rambus?>
Coppermine, probably not. After all, Coppermine isn't only meant for the Camino DRDRAM chipset. It will also go into an upcoming 810e chipset (an 810 proliferation), and that will definitely support SDRAM in one flavor or another.
Timna? One guy said that Intel is yanking the DRDRAM controller out of Timna and replacing it with SDRAM. I think that rumor is totally bogus. Nevertheless, if Timna supports non-Rambus memory, it will probably be through an external MTH component, which kind of defeats the purpose of integration in the first place. In other words, I think Timna will stick to an integrated DRDRAM controller no matter what.
By the way, you forgot to ask about Intel's future products. It's been revealed already that the 460GX chipset, the first one to support the new IA-64 Merced processor, will support SDRAM instead of DRDRAM. Why? The 460GX needs to support gigabytes of memory anyway, and supporting that much memory with DRDRAM would be overkill in bandwidth and expensive.
But what about future IA-64 processors like McKinley, Madison, and Deerfield? And what about future IA-32 processors like Willamette and Foster? Sorry, nothing has been revealed yet. (heh heh)
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