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To: Bilow who wrote (68599)	3/20/2001 6:07:53 PM
From: Don Green	Respond to of 93625

Commentary: Intel raises eyebrows with PC133 forecast By Jack Robertson, Mar 20, 2001 (1:12 PM) URL: /story/OEG20010320S0069 What's this? Intel is telling us its Brookdale chipset supporting PC133 SDRAM will account for one-third of all Pentium 4 chipset sales this year? Pete MacWilliams, Intel Fellow and the company's memory road-map specialist, twice made the projection at the recent Intel Developer Forum. Brookdale doesn't even come on the market until the third quarter of 2001. Now, I never was very good at math, but even I know that means there will have to be a huge burst of Brookdale sales at the end of the year in order to reach a full year's 33% quotient. That big year-end Brookdale/ SDRAM ramp also raises questions about what it portends for Direct RDRAM, so far the only memory supporting Pentium 4. Without PC133 Pentium 4 support right now, you can understand Intel's passionate RDRAM support. But when Brookdale and SDRAM arrive for Pentium 4 later this year, what will Intel's position be? Paul Otellini, executive vice president, has already indicated that Brookdale with SDRAM is Intel's strategy for Pentium 4 to reach volume price points in the PC market. The company has confirmed it will initially offer Brookdale/SDRAM to support the current Willamette chip. That relieves Intel of its current push to recast the high-performance dual-memory-channel Pentium 4 Willamette and Direct Rambus DRAM as a mainstream PC offering. Willamette is a silicon hog of more than 200 sq. mm. Cheap SDRAM can help OEMs cut Willamette PC system cost, but it doesn't change its premium silicon cost. A new 0.13-micron Northwood Pentium 4 is scheduled to arrive in the fourth quarter at nearly half the size of Willamette and presumably at a far lower cost. But linking 1Gbyte/s PC133 SDRAM with the 3.2Gbyte/s Pentium 4, whether the Willamette or the Northwood, is like fueling a supersonic jet with 87-octane unleaded regular. Intel asserts that a big low-end PC market exists that doesn't need more memory bandwidth than provided by PC133. True enough, but this market is already served massively by Advanced Micro Devices' Duron, Intel's own Celeron and Pentium III, Transmeta's Crusoe, and Via's Cyrix. You need a quad-pumped 400MHz Pentium 4 for this market? And, although Intel steadfastly denies accelerating its own DDR chipset for Pentium 4 for a fourth-quarter launch, key memory and motherboard makers believe that will happen. I'm a little lost on this Brookdale road map. So far, asking Intel for better directions hasn't helped. Jack Robertson is EBN's editor at large. E-mail your comments to him at jroberts@cmp.com.