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To: kash johal who wrote (29478)	9/14/1999 9:01:00 AM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Kash, Thanks. I'm following Anand's advice (highlighted below) and just want to make sure that everyone understands that Anand is a 16 year old high-school student who seems to have an affinity for AMD and Cyrix as well as Tom Pabst (based on his "About Anand" section). This doesn't mean he will be biased when he reviews Camino/RDRAM later, but as he points out, "be sure to pay attention to who is publishing the benchmarks". In all honesty, I found his article pretty well balanced -- the article does not actually present RDRAM one way or the other. Since his primary message is to pay attention to the benchmarks, I assume he means that we should look at his benchmark when it comes out on the 27th. From a benchmarking point of view, I personally am waiting for the major publications, like PC Magazine, to publish their tests. I would caution anyone to be suspicious of the results of benchmarks by individuals since we rarely know how they've configured their systems and since benchmarks can be changed significantly sometimes by making very minor configuration changes. I don't believe that most individual testers, like Tom or Anand, have the banks of test systems, nor the expertise to report confidently (my confidence, not theirs -- I'm sure they're very confident) their results. Their test may be valid, or it may be invalid, and you'd never know the parameters used for their tests. Also, given the support for AMD by many of these sites, there may be some bias built in. I'm going to wait for the major pubs, who have extensive benchmarking facilities and expertise, to report on their results. In addition to reporting their testing configurations, they also usually have no ax to grind for or against any particular vendor. Kash, I am curious as to why you didn't post the entire 3 paragraphs, which are less negative than the headline and the little snippet you pulled? Dave ---------------------------------------------- RDRAM - 800MHz of crap? I'm sure you've read all about the benchmarks on RDRAM and how the i820 (Camino) is inferior in every single way to the BX chipset and the usual rants and raves. I'm here to tell you that not all of these benchmarks are unfounded, in fact, there is quite a bit of truth to the current performance of RDRAM on the 820. On the one hand, Intel is claiming that RDRAM's greater bandwidth allows it to perform much better than SDRAM, and on the other VIA (and family) is claiming that SDRAM's lower latency allows it to outperform the more expensive RDRAM technology. I'm not here to answer that question (as that would involve publishing benchmark results which I'm not yet ready to do, however I will say that after quite a few weeks of toying with the 820 and RDRAM, you will see a nice comparison of technologies on the 27th of September here on AnandTech), however I will offer you some words of advice (and some pictures of RDRAM as well) as you're looking at all of these documents either supporting or denouncing RDRAM as a memory solution be sure to pay attention to who is publishing the benchmarks. Of course Intel is going to be making sure that their benchmarks represent RDRAM's strengths, and of course VIA is going to be boasting about PC133 over RDRAM, it is up to you, the consumer, to make sure that you understand this and take a look at independent benchmark results. The ideal comparison (in my mind) would be an Intel BX based motherboard and SDRAM running a Pentium III 600 (100MHz FSB) versus an Intel 820 based motherboard and RDRAM running a Pentium III 600 (100MHz FSB), then the same comparison using the 133MHz FSB. And guess what I have running on two separate test beds in the lab? :)