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To: Doug M. who wrote (69085)	11/24/1998 11:54:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Doug - Re: " through my research I have come to believe that Intel's Carmel server chip set will feature Direct Rambus technology sometime in the second half of 1999." The Camino chip set will support Direct RDRAM and will precede CARMEL by several months. Paul

To: Doug M. who wrote (69085)	11/25/1998 1:09:00 AM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 186894

<What I can say about your point about Rambus not being "suitable" for servers is that Compaq doesn't appear to agree.> Doug, it's not that Rambus' RDRAM isn't suitable for servers. It's just that there isn't a need for RDRAM's higher bandwidth per channel in servers just yet. Why? Because servers are built with massive amounts of memory. This allows a server to support multiple SDRAM channels which widen the memory pipeline. Let's say that I'm building a server with, say, 512 MB of memory. Using 64 MB DIMMs, the server would have to support at least eight memory slots. You could squeeze (i.e. multiplex) all those DIMMs into one single memory channel and make the architecture simpler. But for servers, it's not too hard to take a step up and spread these eight DIMM's across two memory channels, widening the data pipeline. Two PC100 SDRAM channels equals one RDRAM channel in terms of bandwidth. Of course, building two SDRAM channels into your server architecture is slightly more complicated than building one RDRAM channel, but considering that RDRAM is initially going to cost at least 30% more per megabyte than SDRAM, you'll save money in the end. (Later on, as RDRAM's prices go down, you'll start to see more support for RDRAM in servers.) I don't know about Compaq, but Intel's Carmel chipset isn't going to be designed with huge memory capacities in mind. In fact, Carmel is going to be more like a derivative of the Camino desktop chipset. If you recall, Intel currently has two Xeon chipsets, the 440GX and the 450NX. The 440GX was merely a derivative of the desktop 440BX chipset, modified to support Slot 2 and larger amounts of memory. The 450NX was a chipset specifically targeted toward four-way servers requiring huge memory configurations. Carmel is going to be like the 440GX was to the 440BX. (I don't know if Intel has an IA-32 follow-on planned for 450NX in the near future.) That's why Carmel will be supporting RDRAM, since it's taken from Camino and it's memory capacity isn't going to be as large as 450NX. Tenchusatsu