<Because it provided better performance at the same cost. Rambus is expensive, and doesn't provide any major benefit for PC main memory at this time.>
I'm sorry to be blunt, but that's absolutely wrong. 440BX and PC100 SDRAM only contributed a 3% to 5% performance advantage at the time. PC100 cost more than PC66 at that time as well and was in short supply. The only reason anyone had for going to 440BX and PC100 was that all higher-speed Pentium II CPUs at the time (350 MHz and 400 MHz) required a 100 MHz bus.
That was Q2 1998. Now we're nearing the end of Q3 1999, and PC100 is the same price as PC66. There is most definitely a difference between PC66 and PC100 performance, especially with modern AGP graphics cards like Riva TNT2. (If you don't believe me, try figuring out why a Celeron 500 on a 66 MHz bus and PC66 memory runs slower than an "unofficial" Celeron 500 on a 100 MHz bus with PC100 memory. Sure, the bus speed helps, but you need faster memory to go with a faster bus.)
<It might mean something if they get specific [RDRAM being better going forward into 2000 and beyond], otherwise it's just mush-headed marketing talk.>
That's another problem with this whole situation. No one knows who to trust anymore. Marketing is always expected to give only one side of the story, so then we turn to the third-party web sites for information. But more often than not, those web sites will know very little themselves, but they feel like they know everything, including what Intel's ulterior motives must be.
I wish I could tell you more about why I believe Intel. And no, it's not (just) because I care about keeping my job. But I can tell you that once upon a time, no one thought that AGP would be necessary. Nowadays, you can't find too many graphics controllers on the market that aren't AGP. Could a similar scenario arise for Rambus?
Tenchusatsu |
