Steve,
Firstly, Intel is basing its newest processor on RDRAM. Intel is the sort of company that will admit and remedy mistakes rather than try to save face. If they thought RDRAM was dead, they would have said so.
The only chipset Intel has for P4 is DRDRAM based. Regardless of the merits, they will live with DRDRAM for the near future. I am not an expert about DDR, and can not evaluate the engineering difficulties associated with ramping it up. If DDR really does suffer from serious electrical problems (as has been claimed on this thread), that will certainly make DRDRAM a lot more attractive.
Secondly, as an engineer, you MUST accept the technical benefits of RDRAM. I am not saying that you should support it, but any reasonable person with technical knowledge can see there are advantages that make RDRAM a real contender for moving a real system bottleneck as we go into a time where the P4 is about to launch
Like I said, I do not really understand the electrical issues associated with high speed data transfer on a board. Having said that, from a performance point of view, PC266 DDR is better than PC800 DRDRAM because of lower latency and higher peak bandwidth.
Thirdly, whatever your personal preference, or the weighting you put on RDRAM disadvantages compared to the advantages, it is totally unreasonable to say the facts are clear and that RDRAM has very little potential. Something with very little potential would not be being produced in such quantity, and be planned for mainstream products such as Timna and P4 from a company like Intel. Same for Samsung, Sony, Sun Microsystems etc.
I don't see DRDRAM getting any new design wins. This does not bode well for growth over the next two years.
comments like the taxation of petrol in the UK has not risen under Tony Blair really don't help your cause.
I heard that comment repeatedly on BBC news while stuck in my hotel in the UK last week. (I didn't have enough in my tank to risk driving to the pub.) It was stated several times that the high petrol taxes were instituted under the tories.
Scumbria
BTW: Comments made by longs on this thread led me to recommend at my staff meeting last week that we double check our SDRAM interface, in case DDR DIMMS are not available or stable. |
