Spin is an interesting beast.
On the one hand you could say that PC-133 is a rejection (or at least a retardation) of RDRAM, and many would believe that.
On the other hand, you could spin it as: Intel was going to be supporting SDRAM for another 3 years anyway (while RDRAM came down the cost curve and penetrated the lower and lower end PC segments), and whether it's PC-100 or PC-133, it doesn't much matter. And many would believe that.
Personally, I believe PC-133 support only happened because of Via's attack on their chipset market. If Via hadn't supported PC-133, then Intel would have told the OEM's that the choices were PC-100 or RDRAM, as they have been doing until a month ago or so. Which tells me that PC-133 isn't a RDRAM replacement, it's a PC-100 replacement so that Intel can protect its turf.
Will PC-133 slow down RDRAM acceptance? Maybe a hair, but I'll bet that the much bigger factor is simply the slower RDRAM production ramp than originally anticipated. We can argue about the relative performance of SDRAM and DRDRAM, but more important is the perception of performance. And from what I've seen on the Dell, Compaq, and Intel sites, these companies are representing the performance improvements of RDRAM at an even higher level than most of the "Rambus-bulls" could have hoped for. Read the Intel report published today, or the Compaq report represented a few posts back, and you'll see that they're not claiming 10%, 20%, or 30% improvements -- they're making claims of much larger performance improvements. And most people who read these reports aren't going to know whether they're really valid or not, they'll just believe them. It'll get even better when the Dell, Compaq, and CompUSA sales people get in front of the customer and ask them whether they want memory that runs at 133Mhz, or memory that runs at 800Mhz (I know, I know, it's not accurate, but that's how it's going to be presented). It's not going to matter whether they compare 800Mhz to 133Mhz or 100Mhz, the comparison is still going to look very lopsided.
The bottom line is that PC-133 is not going to make DRDRAM go away, it's going to make PC-100 SDRAM go away.
JMO,
Dave |
