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To: jim kelley who wrote (59030)	10/27/2000 4:10:40 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi jim kelley; Re: "As I remember, after the 820 recall, Intel sent prototype i820s to the MOBO manufacturers that ran about 1.5 X the speed of the final production i820s. There was a lot of talk about about de-rating at the time." It was more like 1.15x, not 1.5x, and the rumor was that Intel had to give up the performance to get the systems to work reliably. Intersymbol interference between different memory chips was the problem, if I remember correctly. -- Carl

To: jim kelley who wrote (59030)	10/27/2000 4:52:30 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Jim, <This sounds like a simple marketing decision to de-rate the product so as to minimize cannibalization from the WS business> I seriously doubt it. If Intel had the chance to make their mainstream platform perform the best it could, they would have. Like Kash already pointed out, the workstation market is only a small fraction of the entire PC market. <I don't see any technical issues regarding heat or power that would be expensive or difficult ot overcome. After all, Intel solved these problems easily for the i840.> It could have been signal interference which gets exacerbated as heat rises. The 840's six-layer motherboard (among other things) takes care of the interference issues, but six-layer motherboards are more expensive. I'm sure there are a lot of other issues the engineers had to overcome. These sorts of issues aren't stuff that they'd normally talk about in public, since they're your basic engineering "challenges" that need to be overcome. My suspicion is that RDRAM had more than their fair share of engineering "challenges." And Intel is getting tired of pushing these issues by themselves, especially now that the rest of the industry seems reluctant to help Intel out. Tenchusatsu