Hi Gene Parrott; Re the Viatech news... First of all, it was Via that forced Intel to support PC133. They have a history of altering market dynamics, and they are going full bore in support of DDR. This includes support for the Athlon, as expected. That chipset/CPU combination will rock, when the integrated cache arrives, that is my next machine.
Anyway, I hate to quote the Register articles, they sometimes are quite wrong. So here is the news direct from Via:
April 10, 2000
VIA to Enable DDR266 SDRAM Memory Support in Upcoming Products
VIA Technologies, Inc., today announced it has selected Double Data Rate (DDR266) SDRAM as the memory technology that will follow its successful PC133 for future PC chipsets. DDR266 supported VIA chipsets will be targeted across the PC Market at servers, desktop systems, Value PCs and mobiles.
...
VIA will be producing performance and integrated DDR chipsets for both VIA Cyrix© III/Intel Pentium IIITM and AMD AthlonTM processors starting in 2H 2000.
What Samsung says:
Bob Eminian, a VP for Samsung Semiconductors, said: "Because of the existing PC133 SDRAM infrastructure, and the use of the same packaging and processing technologies, DDR 266 presents no significant investment in manufacturing facilities. This means that it will be a simple transition to volume production of DDR SDRAM parts and PC2100 memory modules for the PC market, which we should expect to see in 2H'00."
What Micron says:
"Once it goes into production, DDR memory module will be very reasonably priced compared to PC133 SDRAM module," said Jeff Mailloux, Director of DRAM Marketing for Micron Technology, Inc. "Just as PC133 was an evolutionary step from PC100, PC2100 logically follows PC133 because of its low cost of implementation. This keeps manufacturing infrastructure costs at a minimum and the consumer is the true price/performance beneficiary."
What Infineon says:
"We always found that our customers' decisions for DDR SDRAM were based on its excellent price/performance features," says Chee Ho, Director of Memory Product Marketing of Infineon Technologies, Inc. "And with many millions of DDR SGRAM parts made for the high-end graphics market, Infineon clearly has the expertise to confirm the relative ease of moving from standard SDRAM to DDR SDRAM manufacturing."
What NEC says: (VC is their big thing, compatible with DDR.)
"The adoption of DDR SDRAM now will also provide a clear migration path to Virtual Channel(R) DDR-SDRAM and the next generation DDR II SDRAM standard that is presently in the ballot process at JEDEC," said Manabu Ando, Assistant General Manager of Memory Engineering, of NEC Electronics, Inc.
viatech.com
As I have said many times in the past three months or so, RDRAM is quite dead, the next standard memory technology is DDR, and the summer of 2000 is when you will start to see it. I'm not gloating, in fact, I feel sorry for the guys who are going to end up holding the bag. It is inevitable now, someone is going to have to hold that bag. It's not going to be a pretty party, and it is probably going to get started relatively soon, though I do not make it a practice to try and predict short term stock moves. But I really don't suspect that people are going to wait till summer to dump their RMBS shares, but they will have to have done so by the end of summer, when the benchmarks become well known. The die hards will hold until the RDRAM market share starts dropping again as the niche closes up.
Initially a perfect solution for memory intensive server and workstation applications, DDR?s low cost and low voltage will ultimately make it an ideal solution for all segments of the PC market, high performance desktop and mobile PCs, Value PCs and even Internet Appliances and mobile devices.
viatech.com
Via is promising to go full bore on supporting DDR, with chipsets for all the major manufacturers, and they are promising to update their website with DDR news. They added a DDR corner. Note that they expect DDR to provide a cost effective solution for pretty much all DRAM market segments, there is no segment left over for RDRAM:
viatech.com
-- Carl
P.S. It's over now guys. As soon as I have posted the rest of the stuff that I have already written, but have not posted, and have given reasonable answers to the various replies I get, I will once again cease posting large numbers of post to this thread. I am sure that a lot of bulls will be much relieved to hear this... |
