Hi Zeev:
re: "you don't say "testicular cancer" in mixed company (VBG), they call it seminoma, this way no one blushes.."
Not to be too sober about it, calling "it" a seminoma in many cases is a mis/understatement and thus poses a risk to wishful thinking males in the 20's, so I thought it best to correct your comment. Testicular Carcinoma is the correct term... Sorry to rain on your party...
Change of topic, regarding Burgoo's bugaboo, there's more good news in them thar hills...
....."Peter MacWilliams, an Intel fellow and director of platform architecture for the company, said Intel could quickly extend its upcoming 810e chip set for the Pentium III to support such parts. But in his view, "there is a lot of noise but very little benefit" to system performance in going the PC133 route. Today's crop of PC100 SDRAMs would yield the same performance as the initial PC133 solution, he said.
... "The PC133 solution offers very little, in some cases no, performance improvement," he said. "Its only significant value is that it gives the marketing people something to use to argue that they have a leg up over the competition."
Others argued that the PC133 DRAMs are a good match to Pentium III-based systems with a 133-MHz bus architecture, at a cost the mainstream PC market can absorb. Pat Gelsinger, vice president of Intel's desktop division, countered that "at most, PC133 is an incremental change, and that is not very interesting to the MIS managers. It might sell in the small-business channel, but the mainstream IT managers want to look very closely at how much performance gain they get from supporting a new memory."
Still, Gelsinger admitted that the Rambus transition "has gotten more difficult with the collapse in pricing for SDRAMs."
"DRAM makers are practically giving away 133-MHz parts with no price premium over PC100 devices, and that is forcing Intel to reevaluate its plans," said Jeff Mitchell, business development manager in Rambus Inc.'s PC division.
At the developer's forum, Intel will disclose benchmarks that Gelsinger said will validate its support for Rambus.
"The third-quarter introduction [of Direct Rambus PCs] is still on track," MacWilliams said. "It is still a go. The key ingredients are all there-the clock chips, the connectors, the RIMMs [Rambus-in-line memory modules]. We have five suppliers of the 72-Mbit RDRAMs and five for the 128/144-Mbit RDRAMs. The key issue is that we have production versions of the chip set."
In Taiwan, motherboard makers said they have good working samples of a B1 iteration of Intel's 810 chip set supporting Direct Rambus. However, they complained that prices of the Rambus modules were astronomical, with numbers quoted as high as $840 for an 800-MHz module in the case of one second-tier OEM.
The additional cost of making an RDRAM is estimated by Intel to be from 20 to 30 percent higher than for SDRAM (one vendor said its cost adder was 50 percent). On the market, RDRAMs cost four to five times as much as SDRAMs. Intel's MacWilliams said the recent nosedive in the price of PC100 SDRAMs-albeit with a small bounceback over the past 10 days-has widened the gap between them and Rambus.
"The DRAM vendors are losing lots of money on SDRAMs," MacWilliams said. "As prices go down they are less willing to track the same aggressive pricing with RDRAMs."
Vendors are charging a stiff premium for RDRAMs running at 400 MHz, which deliver 800 Mbits/s by reading data from both the rising and falling edges of the clock. Estimates for the price of a 128-Mbyte RIMM vary considerably. Intel said such a module would cost about $200. A DIMM of similar density, populated with 64-Mbit PC100 SDRAMs, would be about $80.
One small module maker in Taiwan said its 128-Mbyte RIMM sells for $840; Intel officials dismissed that price as an aberration. Hyundai Electronics America is currently selling 128-Mbyte RIMMs "in the high $300 to $400 range," said Farhad Tabrizi, the company's strategic memory marketing manager.
That price should drop to $250 by the fourth quarter, at which time the 128-Mbyte PC133 DIMM will sell for about $100 to $125, Tabrizi said. The 100 percent premium will reflect the higher cost of the RDRAM package, the more expensive testers and the larger die size of the Rambus parts, he said.
"The pricing for RDRAM now is just ridiculous," said a sales engineer in Taiwan. "We recently paid $400 for a 400-MHz, 128-Mbyte RIMM sample. Personally, I think the DRAM vendors are trying to make excessive profits on RDRAM now to counter the current price fall of SDRAM." In his view, the stiff premium is transitory. Today's tag "doesn't reflect the real price when volume production begins," the engineer said.
Avo Kanadjian, vice president of memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor Inc. (San Jose), expects RDRAMs, primarily at the 128-Mbit density, to have a 50 percent premium over the equivalent PC133 parts. But that equation assumes that the SDRAM price will recover to the $8 range for a 64-Mbit version, he said."
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