The amazing i820 saga
redhill.net.au
There might, somewhere in the history of computing, have been a more disastrous product, with a longer history of failure, than the Intel i820 chipset. But we can't think of any. The i820 was the follow-on chipset to the i810, of which the less said the better. The i810 was a cynical, low-performance product straight out of the Celeron 266 mould. It had a low performance built-in graphics adaptor which, incredibly, couldn't be upgraded, not even with a stand-alone card. Needless to say, it only sold to the unwary. As a Celeron platform, it had little recommend it. As a P-III platform, it was a complete non-starter.
The higher-performance chipset was the i820, and its tale is a saga of truly epic proportions. This was to be the replacement for the mighty BX - in itself a difficult task, for the BX had been an outstanding success: possibly the most successful chipset ever.
From the start the i820's development was dogged by failures. The first problem was Intel's mulish determination to use the expensive, slow RDRAM with it, rather than what the entire industry wanted, SDRAM. This decision alone, which seems to have been taken over the objections of the design engineers, put a mighty dent in the i820's sales potential. Nevertheless, by the end of September 1999, Intel had thousands of i820 motherboards shipped to Intel dealers, ready and waiting for the official release date. Then, only three days before the grand unveiling, someone thought to see what happened if they plugged a Rambus module into all three slots, rather than just one or two. Result?
Crash.
The product launch had to be cancelled and all the motherboards had to be sent back and fixed. And the "fix" was crude in the extreme: disconnect the third RAM slot.
Somewhere around this time, or a little earlier, Intel realised that SDRAM was a must if they were going to sell enough chipsets to make a profit. So they added a "memory translator hub" to convert between the chipset (designed for Rambus) and 133MHz SDRAM they'd grafted on as an afterthought. Problem solved? Well, not quite: the SDRAM version of the i820 seemed to run reliably enough at first, but it was not only much slower than the old BX it was supposed to replace, but slower than the previously-scorned VIA chipsets too. (In fact, even with the RDRAM it was originally designed for, the i820 can't transfer data at the full speed RDRAM is capable of because the main bus is pegged at 133MHz - exactly the same speed as competing chipsets managed with cheap, low-latency SDRAM.) And yet there was no alternative: the old BX could only run the faster 133MHz front-side Pentium IIIs if you overclocked it. Short of recommending a VIA chipset (an unthinkable anathema to Intel), the i820 was the only possibility.
But still worse was to come. Rumours of unexplained hangs and crashes grew up around the i820, and refused to be quieted. Months went by and for all Intel's denials, the reports of instability persisted and grew more certain. Eventually, they had to admit it: the SDRAM version of the i820 was flawed too. Intel had to recall and replace no less than 900,000 motherboards. Even for a firm of their size that was a substantial financial blow. They never did find a fix for it: if you had one they replaced it with a Rambus version (now "fixed" by removing one of the RAM sockets) or else gave your money back so you could buy a VIA board. For those third-party manufacturers unfortunate enough to have shipped a substantial quantity of i820 SDRAM boards, it was a disaster - ASUS in particular lost a fortune with (as they tell it) no compensation - which perhaps explains why they put so much emphasis on AMD platforms now.
The net result for Intel was nothing short of disaster. With the i820 chipset and the Rambus deal they planned to achieve several things:
Provide a suitable platform for the faster, 133MHz bus Pentium III CPUs.
Maintain their dominant position in the chipset market.
Extend their near-monopolies in CPU and chipset manufacture to yet another area: RAM - via their part-ownership of Rambus.
None of these goals were reached. AMDs Athlon went from strength to strength, and AMD approached ever closer to their aim of having 30% of the world CPU market - at the expene of Intel, of course. Intel's arch-rival in the chipset market, VIA, grasped the opportunity to profit from Intel's blunders and take the number one sales spot from them. And Rambus RAM remained a non-starter. (The Rambus company, by the way, overreached itself when it started to claim that it had invented SDRAM and was entitled to royalties on that as well as RDRAM. Several major RAM manufacturers spinelessly paid up, but several went to court and succeeded not only in having those absurd claims thrown out, but also in having Rambus found guilty of fraud. The appeals process continues but we may yet see some Rambus directors spend time behind bars.) |
