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

To: jcholewa who wrote (123358)	8/31/2000 10:41:45 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Respond to of 1570548

JC, somewhat in counterpoint to the following: But even that is somewhat irrelevant, since we likely will not see any dual channel (slash interleaved) implementation of SDRAM in the reasonably near future. It's just a too expensive option, and AMD doesn't do expensive. So only Rambus memory will have the benefit of dual channels (to its credit, DRDRAM is reportedly a little cheaper to which to do this sort of parallelism). There was this review of the Ali7 dual channel SDRAM socket7 chipset, tomshardware.com . Seemed to work pretty well, and definitely aimed at "cheap", with UMA graphics and all. Granted, it's not likely to be very successful market wise, given its dependence on the unavailable K6-III or the sparsely available K6-2+. But it seems like a good proof in principle that dual channel SDRAM/DDR doesn't have to be that expensive, either. If there's a need, it'll get done. Cheers, Dan.

To: jcholewa who wrote (123358)	8/31/2000 12:43:22 PM
From: Petz	Respond to of 1570548

JC, here's some sort-of proof for the "pins don't matter" argument. The new SiS-630 chipset has 618 pins -- it combines a northbridge and a southbridge for the P3 and Celeron with integrated graphics, Ethernet, Home PNA, Sound, I/O and PC133/PC100 SDRAM controller. I think I read the list price is $45, but I bet it really sells for $30 or so. I suspect we'll find it on motherboards for $100 or so. I think an Athlon+northbridge-with-SDRAM-interface or a Celeron+northbridge-with-SDRAM-interface would have less pins than this puppy. Cost per pin is certainly less than 0.05, probably 2 cents. So when the Rambus fanatics get all excited about saving 48 pins, they are talking about $1.00 to $2.50 of cost vs. the $1.00 per megabyte additional cost of RDRAM. Petz