Hi The Prophet; Re: "I'm beginning to think that, until a DDR chipset is ready, it would be foolish for INTC to release an SDRAM P-4 chipset. If they did so, while RDRAM is expensive, many would shift to SDRAM, thereby reducing demand for RDRAM and slowing the ramp-up and together with it the decline in RDRAM pricing. The circular effect of this would be to make the high end P-4 less competitive with the high end AMD DDR computer."
The basic problem with this logic is that it is entirely from the Rambus point of view. Look at it instead from the Intel point of view. Right now, they are getting much less money for their P4 CPUs than they are accustomed to receiving for high end PC CPUs. They're having to put out a rebate, in addition to those low prices. To get away from that problem, Intel has to convert over to SDRAM and DDR.
The problem for Intel is that too much of a P4 system's cost is in the memory subsystem. They don't collect that cash, Samsung does instead, and Intel don't like that. The simple solution is to reduce the amount of RDRAM used, so Samsung has less ability to charge top dollar for the stuff. Sure, increases in volume will eventually reduce the price, but it sure hasn't changed the price much as of yet. Even Samsung doesn't claim that RDRAM is as cheap to make as SDRAM, even the 4-bank RDRAM that will be available someday.
The other thing to note is that as Scumbria has repeatedly noted (and as Jdaasoc has been recently supporting with links) the performance of the current crop of x86 CPUs does not depend much on the memory subsystem. These modern computers have cache memory that eliminates the need for most accesses. The only computer programs that show improvement for RDRAM also show improvement for DDR, but those are not the typical computer use. The place and route programs that I'm always waiting to complete on this workstation, for instance, show little dependence on memory speed, but lots of dependence on CPU speed.
DDR provides a slight performance improvement over SDRAM (assuming that you are not overclocking either), but that performance improvement is worth it if DDR sells at only a slight premium over SDRAM. The slight price premium has already been achieved with PC1600, and Micron has promised that they will drive down the price of PC2100 in 2Q01.
-- Carl |
