Intel To Ease Into DDR Memory
In 2001
(02/27/01, 9:05 p.m. ET) By Mark Hachman, TechWeb News
SAN JOSE, Calif.—Intel Corp. plans to introduce
DDR DRAM support for the Pentium 4 during the first
quarter of 2001, but not the fastest PC266 speed, Intel
executives said Tuesday.
In an interview at the Intel Developer Forum, Peter
MacWilliams, an Intel (stock: INTC) fellow and
director of platform architecture, confirmed previous
statements that Brookdale, the company's Pentium 4
chipset, will be released in the second half of 2001.
But support for the fastest double-data rate (DDR)
memory will have to wait.
"We don't believe PC266 [DDR] works on paper,"
MacWilliams said, adding that the company will only
support PC200 DDR DRAM when Brookdale's DDR
interface rolls out next year.
Brookdale is an important product for Intel, because it
will tie the Pentium 4 to cheaper SDRAM.
Currently, the Pentium 4's Intel 850 chipset uses
memory designed by Direct Rambus, a higher-priced,
but higher-performance alternative.
While this may be desirable for higher-end machines,
moving the Pentium 4 into the mainstream PC will likely
require cheaper memory.
However, Brookdale will be designed with single-rate
SDRAM in mind. Intel had promised to add DDR
support as well, which doubles the performance of
SDRAM by sending twice as much information per
clock cycle.
According to Samsung Electronics, a leading DRAM
firm and a chief proponent of Direct Rambus DRAM,
128 Mbits of Direct Rambus memory costs about $18,
while DDR costs about $8.
Intel spokesman George Alfs also confirmed that Intel
will ship a chipset in the second quarter of 2002 with
support for only 4 banks of Direct Rambus memory.
Current chipsets support 16 banks of memory, a more
expensive solution.
Samsung believes that a 4-bank chipset could pare the
cost difference between DDR and Direct Rambus
roughly in half, according to Dieter Mackowiak, senior
vice-president of sales and marketing for Samsung
Electronics Inc., San Jose, Calif.
The swirling tides of the memory market are influenced
as much by political and legal factors as much as by
market economics or technical issues.
DDR is seen by some as a high-performance and
relatively inexpensive upgrade to single-data-rate
SDRAM.
Direct Rambus memory has been strongly supported by
Samsung Electronics, which received a $100 million
investment by Intel in January of 1999.
Tuesday, Samsung confirmed an additional undisclosed
investment by Intel into Samsung, designed to increase
Samsung's ability to test and verify Direct Rambus
memory.
The back-end test equipment will come online during
the second quarter, when Samsung is predicting it will
manufacture a little more than the equivalent of 12
million 128-Mbit Direct Rambus chips, according to
Samsung's Mackowiak.
During the second quarter of 2001, Samsung plans to
manufacture about 3 million 128-Mbit DDR
equivalents.
During the 2001 year, Samsung plans to dedicate about
30 percent of its output to RDRAM, 10 percent to
DDR, and 25 percent to 256-Mbit SDRAM chips, in
addition to flash memory and SRAM.
"In this difficult time of the market, it is important to be
very diversified," Mackowiak said.
Intel's argument is that it doesn't want to revisit the
problems it had rolling out its first Direct Rambus
chipset, the Pentium III's Intel 820.
Intel kept running into electrical problems testing the
memory, a problem it wants to avoid repeating with
DDR.
"When we started to roll out the platform with Rambus
at Comdex 1998 we thought we had all the issues
worked out," MacWilliams said. "But when we thought
we were done, we found something else."
But officials at rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
(stock: AMD), which already supports both PC200
and PC266 memory in its existing AMD-760 chipset,
expressed confidence in the technology.
"We're very confident in the platform," said Ward
Tisdale, a company spokesman. "We're received a lot
of support for it." |
