Re Micron stepping back out of DDR chipset business... This isn't much of a surprise, (if true, I've been rushed and haven't found an original link to a verifiable news source on this yet. But I don't mean to doubt the accuracy.) Read this from late last year:
'Samurai' may spur DDR mkt.October 18, 1999
Hoping to stimulate sales of higher-speed memory, Micron Technology Inc. said it may put its double-data-rate, SDRAM-enabled Samurai chipset out for license to accelerate the market's adoption of PC266 DDR devices.
Dean Klein, vice president of the integrated-products group at Boise, Idaho-based Micron, said the company "isn't in the chipset business, but [wants] to enable the early penetration of DDR memory into the market." Klein said widespread availability of DDR chipsets is the gating function to ramping up PC266 sales.
techweb.com
The purpose of the Samurai was to make sure that DDR chipsets were available. Now with ALi coming out on August 1, AMD and VIA to follow, Micron evidently is sufficiently assured of the need for DDR that it is no longer going to supply the parts.
The basic fact is that there were way too many companies coming out with way too many chipsets for the DDR PC market. There was no way that all of them could be successful. Don't be surprised to see another company or two drop out. Machines are in beta test all over the place. Perhaps the Micron chipset came up a little short in the performance category, relative to the VIA chipset. That would be enough to convince the Micron people to back off. Of course, this is only speculation, I have no connection to any of these companies.
The big DDR supporter is VIA, and they are unequivocal in their support of the technology, as is Micron. Look for Micron to make the memory chips, and VIA to make the chipsets.
This is all about companies doing what they specialize in. Micron specializes in memory, not chipsets. No surprises here. Now something that would be surprising would be to see VIA announce that they are going to go into the memory business, and are going to produce RDRAM...
-- Carl
P.S. I'm sure someone put this link into the thread, but I missed it. It's PC World testing a DDR machine:
Money for Nothing? Rambus Performance Falls Short
pcworld.com
Of course I've been saying for some time that this summer would be the time when DDR starts to be obviously the memory technology of the future. It is now summer 2000 and DDR is starting to roll. |
