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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: xun who wrote (110690)	5/12/2000 5:46:00 PM
From: xun	Respond to of 1583508

Intel board recall offers clue to Rambus motherboard penetration By Jack Robertson Electronic Buyers' News (05/12/00, 11:50:00 AM EDT) SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Intel Corp.'s recall this week of motherboards containingfaulty circuitry has produced an unintended by-product by revealing roughly how many boards the company has shipped to date equipped with the new Direct Rambus DRAM interface. Since rolling out the platform in November following a series of technical delays, Intel has shipped fewer than 500,000 motherboards populated by the company's Intel 820 chip set and Direct RDRAM, according to industry estimates. The chip duo, which supports high-end Pentium III microprocessors, has been carefully positioned in an effort to take a significant chunk of the workstation and top-tier PC markets in 2000. As it stands, the total number of Rambus-enabled motherboards so far represents only about 1% of the 40 million boards shipped in the first quarter, according to figures from industry analyst Dean McCarron of Mercury Research Inc. in Scottsdale Ariz. Analysts were quick to note that Rambus-enabled motherboards are not expected to gain an appreciable head of steam until the second half of the year, so the slow start did not come as a big surprise. The figures are interesting, however, because Intel and Direct RDRAM architect Rambus Inc. in Mountain View, Calif., have been reluctant to discuss just how many systems have shipped to date. The disclosure resulted from a recall staged earlier this week by Intel, which discovered that certain motherboards shipping with the 820 chip set could intermittently reboot or hang up (see Jan. 21 story). The boards did not actually ship with Direct RDRAM memory -- those boards have reported no trouble, according to Intel -- but were equipped with a so-called Memory Translator Hub (MTH) that enabled the 820 chip set to communicate with SDRAM memory. The MTH component was identified as containing the flaw, Intel reported. When asked to quantify the scope of the problem, Intel said that fewer than a million MTH-enabled motherboards have been shipped into the market since November. Various industry estimates project that motherboards with the MTH/SDRAM combination have accounted for between two-thirds and three-quarters of all 820 boards shipped, meaning that somewhere between 330,000 and 500,000 boards have shipped with both the 820 chip set and Direct RDRAM. Other information appears to bear out the estimates. According to preliminary data from an upcoming DRAM global market survey from Sherry Garber, an analyst with Semico Research Corp., Phoenix, total Direct RDRAM shipments in the first four months of 2000 amounted to 2 million units. Accounting for carryover inventory from last year and Direct RDRAM in stock but not yet plugged into boards, the unit tally would support a total of about 350,000 Direct Rambus-enabled boards shipped so far, Garber said. McCarron said revised Mercury Research numbers indicate as many as 500,000 boards populated by the 820 chip set and Rambus memory shipped during the first four months of the year, a figure that included more shipments to first-tier OEMs than previously thought. "Taiwan motherboard vendors traditionally have a very fast turnaround and shipped [820] boards with the MTH and SDRAM option," he said. "First-tier OEMs take a little longer and ramped up their 820 [motherboard ] shipments with Direct Rambus in April after the first quarter figures."