Favorable Comments in October Computer Shopper!
The October issue of Computer Shopper has a couple of articles favorable to RDRAM. -Bandwidth Inside-, pg. 157; & -CPUs Race the Clock-, pg. 323.
I could not find the articles on their online site, so I copied some of the text below:
Bandwidth Inside- is almost entirely about the "revved up" 820 chipset. It goes on to describe its advantages as "133 MHz system bus, and support for a new type of fast memory called Rambus DRAM". It then mentions AGP-4X & ATA/66, and quotes Dell's marketing manager for the Dimension line as saying "this four-way tuneup yields an overall performance gain of 7-10% over a similarly configured 440BX system." And, "Industry benchmarks don't test concurrent processing, which the new chipset supports, so actual gains could be greater."
Intel's Ferron-Jones is quoted as saying " ...its 133 MHz front-side bus & RDRAM combined yield almost 150% the bandwidth of a comparable system with 100 MHz SDRAM." And, "...enables data speeds of 1GB/s between the processor and memory controller hub, whereas a 100 MHz system bus on the 440BX chipset moves data at a comparatively pokey 520 MB/s."
It says Gateway & Dell will "stoke their high-end desktops with the 820 immediately" but Micron will use VIA hardware instead. Other supportive statements are throughout the article; however, also with some references to the temporary higher cost.
CPUs Race...- is more about Intel vs. AMD, Cyrix, VIA, etc. but does talk about PIII & Athlon supporting "...AGP, fast new RDRAM, the upcoming superfast PCI bus, and more."
FWIW (long since Jan.) -GWD |
