Jozef, let's examine your timeline.
5/9/2000 - Intel says DDR is not on the roadmap.
11/17/2000 - Doubts come up about the future of RDRAM.
1/19/2001 - Intel previews Brookdale, and mentions DDR.
If you look at the quote you linked to, you'll see that Burns never denied SDRAM being on the roadmap. He only said that *his* roadmap did not include DDR. Therefore, what's wrong with the explanation that, between the months of May and January of the following year, it suddenly dawned on Intel management that RDRAM wouldn't hit the levels of commodity pricing needed to open an entryway into the mainstream market for Pentium 4, and yet, still a higher performance technology was needed to maintain a competitive position? Upon such a realization, management would have had Burns revise his roadmap to include DDR, at which point he would have had to scramble together a team to add DDR support to the early i845 design in time to demo it by January.
I don't mean to come up with wild theories and speculations, but you can't ignore this possibility, given the time difference between Intel's first claim, and the reality 8 months later. It's not a lie if they really didn't have DDR on the roadmap, and then added it later when it became a good business decision to do so. Anything could have happened during the time between the two articles. A lie would have only been one explanation - and you know it.
wbmw |
