Intel set to use PC1600, skip PC2100 until Brookdale
Is this an attempt to blur the performance gap of DDR and RDRAM?
"We don't believe PC266 [DDR] works on paper," MacWilliams said, adding that the company will only support PC200 DDR DRAM when Brookdale's DDR interface rolls out next year.
techweb.com
Intel To Ease Into DDR Memory In 2001
(02/27/01, 9:05 p.m. ET) By Mark Hachman, TechWeb News
SAN JOSE, Calif.—Intel Corp. plans to introduce DDR DRAM support for the Pentium 4 during the first quarter of 2001, but not the fastest PC266 speed, Intel executives said Tuesday.
In an interview at the Intel Developer Forum, Peter MacWilliams, an Intel (stock: INTC) fellow and director of platform architecture, confirmed previous statements that Brookdale, the company's Pentium 4 chipset, will be released in the second half of 2001.
But support for the fastest double-data rate (DDR) memory will have to wait.
"We don't believe PC266 [DDR] works on paper," MacWilliams said, adding that the company will only support PC200 DDR DRAM when Brookdale's DDR interface rolls out next year.
Brookdale is an important product for Intel, because it will tie the Pentium 4 to cheaper SDRAM.
Currently, the Pentium 4's Intel 850 chipset uses memory designed by Direct Rambus, a higher-priced, but higher-performance alternative.
While this may be desirable for higher-end machines, moving the Pentium 4 into the mainstream PC will likely require cheaper memory.
However, Brookdale will be designed with single-rate SDRAM in mind. Intel had promised to add DDR support as well, which doubles the performance of SDRAM by sending twice as much information per clock cycle.
According to Samsung Electronics, a leading DRAM firm and a chief proponent of Direct Rambus DRAM, 128 Mbits of Direct Rambus memory costs about $18, while DDR costs about $8.
Intel spokesman George Alfs also confirmed that Intel will ship a chipset in the second quarter of 2002 with support for only 4 banks of Direct Rambus memory. Current chipsets support 16 banks of memory, a more expensive solution.
Samsung believes that a 4-bank chipset could pare the cost difference between DDR and Direct Rambus roughly in half, according to Dieter Mackowiak, senior vice-president of sales and marketing for Samsung Electronics Inc., San Jose, Calif.
The swirling tides of the memory market are influenced as much by political and legal factors as much as by market economics or technical issues.
DDR is seen by some as a high-performance and relatively inexpensive upgrade to single-data-rate SDRAM.
Direct Rambus memory has been strongly supported by Samsung Electronics, which received a $100 million investment by Intel in January of 1999.
Tuesday, Samsung confirmed an additional undisclosed investment by Intel into Samsung, designed to increase Samsung's ability to test and verify Direct Rambus memory.
The back-end test equipment will come online during the second quarter, when Samsung is predicting it will manufacture a little more than the equivalent of 12 million 128-Mbit Direct Rambus chips, according to Samsung's Mackowiak.
During the second quarter of 2001, Samsung plans to manufacture about 3 million 128-Mbit DDR equivalents.
During the 2001 year, Samsung plans to dedicate about 30 percent of its output to RDRAM, 10 percent to DDR, and 25 percent to 256-Mbit SDRAM chips, in addition to flash memory and SRAM.
"In this difficult time of the market, it is important to be very diversified," Mackowiak said.
Intel's argument is that it doesn't want to revisit the problems it had rolling out its first Direct Rambus chipset, the Pentium III's Intel 820.
Intel kept running into electrical problems testing the memory, a problem it wants to avoid repeating with DDR.
"When we started to roll out the platform with Rambus at Comdex 1998 we thought we had all the issues worked out," MacWilliams said. "But when we thought we were done, we found something else."
But officials at rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (stock: AMD), which already supports both PC200 and PC266 memory in its existing AMD-760 chipset, expressed confidence in the technology.
"We're very confident in the platform," said Ward Tisdale, a company spokesman. "We're received a lot of support for it." |
