Hi KeepItSimple; A note on DELL's pricing for RDRAM systems, supposedly comparable to SDRAM etc...
The figures as of today (April 2, 2000) are as follows, from the DELL web site:
128MB RDRAM (standard)
256MB RDRAM [add $680]
384MB RDRAM [add $1420]
512MB RDRAM [add $1820]
128MB RDRAM w/ECC [add $100]
256MB RDRAM w/ECC [add $980]
384MB RDRAM w/ECC [add $1870]
512MB RDRAM w/ECC [add $2420]
Note that people on this thread have been comparing prices for regular memory sizes, not ECC, but RDRAM has a history of bit failures, and, consequently, requires ECC.
I believe that the pricing for the 128MB machine is being subsidized by Intel. The clue is in the pricing for additional memory, as noted above. It is hard for me to figure out what you would want with a hot machine that only had 128MB, if performance is that big of an issue, you would want 256MB as a minimum, and probably a lot more:
A 128MB machine is big enough to do a lot of engineering with, but not the type of state of the art engineering that stretches a machine. But the DELL machines are being sold as leading edge workstations.
As an example with Xilinx software, with which I am most intimately familiar, the following app note gives 512MB minimum for the XCV800 and XCV1000 designs. Virtual memory requirements are 800MB:
**XCV800, XCV1000 512MB 800MB
support.xilinx.com
I should note that Xilinx has already announced parts with twice the capacity of the above, so if a designer doesn't want to have to buy a new computer in about six months, he had better stay away from machines that top out at 512MB, especially if that 512MB comes with an extremely high price tag. I should also note that Xilinx installation documents have historically tended to understate the system requirements. This is true of most makers, they don't want to admit that their tools require an expensive workstation to run well.
The bottom line - a cutting edge workstation with RDRAM costs two to three times the price of a PC-133 SDRAM machine, depending on the amount of memory used. My own machine takes 768MB, which is impossible with the DELL series B, or at least doesn't show up on their system selection tables.
-- Carl
P.S. Also of interest:
Design Manager 6.0.1: Out of memory errors with Windows95
support.xilinx.com
This Xilinx application has run out of memory ...
support.xilinx.com
Solutions:
...
3. Install more physical RAM.
support.xilinx.com |
