Intel demos PC with Direct Rambus DRAM
By Andrew MacLellan
Electronic Buyers' News
(11/19/98, 11:07 a.m. EDT)
LAS VEGAS — Intel Corp. demonstrated its next-generation PC platform at Comdex featuring Direct Rambus DRAM main memory and a 133-MHz front-side bus.
Though there are still bugs to be worked out of the system, Intel and its partners said all the pieces are in place to ensure the availability of Rambus memory and other constituent parts for next year's PC market. While Intel did not identify other components of its high-speed platform, next year's PCs are expected to contain a Katmai processor running upwards of 400-MHz, and a version of the Camino chip set, both of which are slated for introduction in the first half of 1999.
Intel expects such systems to dominate the $1,200 to $3,500 PC market in 2000, and said it has also identified early interest among OEMs looking to push the technology into the price-sensitive sub-$1,000 territory.
"The thing we want to make clear today is that we've hit all of the milestones that we discussed [two years ago]," said Pete MacWilliams, an Intel fellow and director of platform architecture for Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.). "We said we'd have a working PC platform by the end of 1998, and we have that today."
Upwards of seven DRAM makers will have the 800-MHz Direct RDRAM chips in volume production in the first quarter of 1999, with another couple of module makers lending their support, MacWilliams said.
Many chip makers view the introduction of the high-speed Rambus interface warily, both because of its aggressive claimed performance improvement, and because its suppliers must pay a small royalty to the technology's creator, Rambus Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.). Because the speed of Direct RDRAM chips is much greater than the 100- to 133-MHz SDRAM used today, and because the switch to Rambus memory requires new voltage levels, packaging and module types, motherboard slot configurations and other supporting technologies must be developed in parallel, and some component suppliers are skeptical that the launch will proceed smoothly.
However, Intel likened its efforts to move the industry toward the high-speed memory interface to last year's successful program to launch the PC-100 SDRAM technology that dominates today's consumer computer market. "PC-100 was a nightmare for a lot of people in the fourth quarter of 1997," MacWilliams said. "In reality it was a bunch of minor incompatibility problems that were all worked out."
Still, the company acknowledged that it has a six-month challenge ahead if it is to move Rambus memory into the market in mid-1999 as planned. "There's a lot of difference between prototyping and volume production," MacWilliams said. "There is still a lot of work left to do between now and mid-year."
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