pomp:
Everytime you turn around RDRAM is getting faster. Look at yesterday's last PC133 article. It seem that RDRAM is 2.5 times faster
ebnews.com
IDF update: Intel confirms support for PC133; will use current specs
By Jack Robertson
Electronic Buyers' News
(09/01/99, 07:38:44 PM EDT)
Intel Corp. late today made it official: the company will add support of PC133 SDRAM to its chipset line, citing a near-term lack of availability of the Direct Rambus DRAM architecture it has been promoting for nearly three years.
Even so, Peter MacWilliams, an Intel fellow and director of platform architecture for the Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker, said the support of PC133 will have no effect on the company's planned transition to Direct RDRAM.
"As soon as Direct Rambus production ramps up, we expect to move rapidly to the new memory chip," MacWilliams said today at the semi-annual Intel Developer Forum in Palm Springs, Calif.
While Intel confirmed its support, the company's endorsement was lukewarm based on its assessment that PC133 showed little performance increase over the PC100 SDRAM interface now used in most PCs.
"It will be widely available in the market and the higher speed essentially comes at no extra premium, so why not use it?" MacWilliams said. "Basically it is lack of Direct RDRAM availability. We see PC133 as an interim memory co-existing with Direct Rambus through 2001," he added.
The inexorable slide towards PC133 support first began around March, MacWilliams said, about the time the Intel 820, or Camino, chipset was first delayed. In the interim, OEMs began pushing for alternative memory solutions, he said. "But maybe we weren't listening enough," MacWilliams said, when asked to explain why Intel has stubbornly defended its Rambus position to the exclusion of all other alternatives.
Some analysts said they saw Intel's decision from a mile away. "It was everything we expected, basically," said Mark Edelstone, analyst with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. in San Francisco. "Our view was that the [DRAM] transition was simply too aggressive. In the months prior to IDF, the roadmap suggested the market would be converted by 2001. That never made any sense."
MacWilliams said customers ultimately will determine how fast the market moves from PC133 to Rambus. "Intel strongly supports an early transition to Direct Rambus," he said. "However, there are market forces we don't control. We want to remain flexible to provide what the market wants."
Intel did not reveal which of its upcoming chipsets will support the interface, although industry sources have suggested that the Solano device, slated for introduction next year, is a strong candidate. MacWilliams said no chipset has yet been identified, but added that the device when selected will support only PC100/133 and not Direct Rambus.
MacWilliams denied that Intel's plans to introduce its PC133-enabled chipset in the first half of 2000 will miss the market, despite the fact that several Taiwan-based third-party chipset makers plan to deliver devices as early as this fall. "Based on the volume ramp of [PCs using] PC133 memory next year, our [chipset] timing is about right," he said.
Jay Bell, a senior fellow at Dell Computer Corp. in Round Rock, Texas, told reporters at IDF that in 64-Mbit equivalents, about 50% of the company's DRAM purchases by the middle of next year would be Direct RDRAM. Dell's Rambus transition will be faster than expected, Edelstone said, based on his previous conversations with Dell executives.
Intel also confirmed that it will adopt the current PC133 industry standard, scotching earlier reports by EBN that the company might develop a slightly different 133-MHz specification. The company cautioned, however, that it is studying whether any interface changes may be needed to enable it to bring chipsets supporting the interface to market.
MacWilliams further acknowledged that Intel has dropped the hybrid S-RIMM modules that could use either Direct Rambus or SDRAM chips. Instead, it will use the Memory Translator Hub (MTH), previously reported as a switch on the PC motherboard that can connect either Direct RDRAM RIMMs or SDRAM DIMMs.
Bell said that switching a chipset designed to work with Direct Rambus to SDRAM memory actually handicapped system performance. Dell's tests showed that swapping the MTH inside the Camino chipset to support SDRAM slowed the system to below the performance of a 440BX chipset. In other tests, an 800-MHz Direct RDRAM platform outperformed a 440BX with SDRAM by about 2.2 to 2.5 times, Bell said.
While Rambus availability has been in question for some months, Intel said progress is, in fact, being made. Four memory vendors will be in production in the third quarter with 128-Mbit Direct RDRAMs. This is expected to increase to five by year's end and to as many as eight in the first quarter. MacWilliams said two vendors are expected to bring the first 256-Mbit Direct Rambus chips to production in the second quarter next year.
In other areas, MacWilliams said Intel has no plans now to add support for double-data-rate SDRAM. "We've evaluated DDR several times for desktops and each time decided not to support this memory," he said.
However, Intel is seriously considering adding DDR support in its server chipsets, "based on what our OEMs are telling us," he added. Intel's DDR server interest may also be spurred by the disclosure earlier today by Reliance Computer Corp., San Jose, that most major server OEMs have endorsed its third-party DDR SDRAM-enabled chipset. |
