Bandwidth Inside
September 13, 1999
Computer Shopper via NewsEdge Corporation :
Intel's new 820 chip set supplants the 440BX
and aims to push performance to higher levels.
By Rik Fairlie
Most people don't give the lowly chip set a
second thought, but Intel Corp. is set to release
technology that makes it worthy of some serious
consideration. Its new 820 chip set contains a
quartet of enhancements that should bump up
the performance of bandwidth-hogging apps
like speech recognition, digital and video
imaging, and 3D games.
The revved-up 820, the successor to the 440BX
chip set, opens up the internal bandwidth with a
133MHz system bus and support for a new type
of fast memory called Rambus DRAM
(RDRAM). It also accommodates AGP 4x
graphics and Ultra ATA/66 hard drive
technology, which doubles the data-transfer
rate to 66MB/sec.
This four-way tune-up yields an overall
performance gain of 7 to 10 percent over a
similarly configured 440BX-based system,
according to Barbara Ehle, product marketing
manager for Dell Computer Corp.'s Dimension
line. Industry benchmarks don't test concurrent
processing, which the new chip set supports, so
actual gains could be greater.
The architecture of the 820 is impressive. Its
133MHz front-side bus and RDRAM combined
yield almost 150 percent the bandwidth of a
comparable system with 100MHz SDRAM,
according to Mike Ferron-Jones, marketing
manager for Intel's desktop products group. The
133MHz system bus enables data speeds of
1GB/sec between the processor and
memory-controller hub, whereas a 100MHz
system bus on the 440BX chip set moves data at
a comparatively pokey 520MB/sec.
Also opening up the bandwidth is RDRAM,
which is engineered to handle multiple
simultaneous pipelined transactions on its data
path. This enables concurrent transactions on
the bus, so hard drives, CD-ROM drives, and
USB devices can all hit the interconnect bus
more quickly and with better bandwidth.
"SDRAM is starting to become a bottleneck,
and RDRAM will help fix that, " Ehle says.
"RDRAM enables concurrent processing so that
you could run an antivirus program in
background and you'd never know it's there."
The downside: RDRAM is more expensive.
"Per megabyte, it's at least two times the cost of
SDRAM," Ferron-Jones says. "We don't
expect the price to go down this year."
That means you will pay a $50 to $100 premium
for a system using RDRAM, Ehle says. As an
alternative, the 820 chip set will also support
SDRAM and enable users to upgrade to
RDRAM as they wish.
As for AGP graphics, Intel says the new chip
set will fast-forward rates to 40 frames per
second, approximately 41 percent speedier than
those of a comparable 440BX-based system. Of
course, you'll need an AGP 4x graphics card to
detect any improvement. Fortunately, a pack of
new AGP 4x cards is already hitting the store
shelves. (See the Hardware Trends article, "The
Race Gets Real, " in this issue.)
Dell will ship its new Dimension XPS B series
with an nVidia NV10 graphics card that handles
AGP 4x. Gateway, on the other hand, may wait
a few months to include AGP 4x cards in its
Performance series. The reason? New graphics
accelerators sometimes don't immediately
realize their performance potential, says Randy
Farwell, Gateway's consumer desktop product
manager. "When we went from 1x to 2x AGP,
some of the 1x AGP cards were actually faster
on benchmarks," he says. "But we'll certainly
use AGP 4x as soon as possible, because it will
be a significant boost for gamers."
The 820 will also support Ultra ATA/66 hard
drives, which double the throughput and have
been available for months. Until now, however,
they have not been natively supported by
motherboards; rather, users have had to install
controller cards to see performance gains.
Dell and Gateway will stoke their high-end
desktops with the 820 immediately. Micron
Electronics, on the other hand, is employing a
new chip set from Via Technologies that it says
will be considerably less expensive than the 820.
The new 820 chip set, while not as
attention-grabbing as the launch of a new
processor, should deliver some compelling
performance gains. "Our customers are pretty
sophisticated users, and a lot of them have been
waiting for this," Dell's Ehle says. "They're
looking for a good reason to buy that next
high-end computer, and this could be it."
Active Links
developer.intel.com/design/chipsets/index.htm
Intel chip sets
www.rambus.com Rambus DRAM news
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[Copyright 1999, Ziff Wire]
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