Hi mishedlo; Re ptnewell: "(1) Intel has not announced any DDR standard. Prior to using PC066, PC100, and PC133, Intel announced standards to resolve incompatibilities between vendors (the JEDEC "standard" in each case proving insufficiently standard)."
VIA drove the PC133 standard, Intel being late to the party, did not. While Intel did publish a PC133 spec, the contents of it matched the JEDEC spec, and it didn't get out until April of this year. That was about at the same time that they were shipping engineering samples of PC133 chips. I would expect that Intel will publish a DDR spec at about the same time that they start shipping engineering sample DDR chipsets, and that wouldn't be until March 2001 or so.
Re "(2) Intel has announced a $70 rebate on the use of RDRAM in the Pentium 4. Since price has always been the biggest complaint, nothing could more thoroughly undermine establishing a DDR volume market."
Intel is giving away $70 per P4 that goes out with RDRAM. While this is good for RDRAM, it is hardly an indication that Intel is going to avoid DDR, which would be more profitable for them. Note that the giveaway drops to $60 in 1Q01, and then goes away.
He seems to think that Intel not supporting DDR will prevent DDR from becoming mainstream. That theory was busted when VIA drove PC133 into mainstream, and at the same time, took away a substantial portion of Intel's chipset business. Intel no longer drives the memory business through their selection of chipset memory interfaces. In short, watching Intel isn't as useful as it once was...
-- Carl |
