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The News From Computex, Including Non-Rambus P4s
M-Doggy writes: "With the festivities at Computex over in Taipei bringing in more out-of-towners
than the Chinese New Year, a plethora of new product announcements and sneak peeks
have hit the show floor. I noticed that AnandTech already has two articles up
covering the action. The
first one covers what was seen on the floor, including the AMD 760, NVIDIA's
Crush chipset, and more. The
second one has some interesting information regarding the non-RAMBUS solutions
for the Pentium 4 and even includes some preliminary benchmarks. Both speak of
the incredible politics behind the show; politics that rival even the recent events
in the Senate." (Read below for another snippet on those non-Rambus P4s.)
And Tuzanor writes: "Yahoo is reporting that Intel is releasing the i845, the first P4 chipset that doesn't use 'fast but expensive' Rambus memory. Funny, the story says that they will be using the "current standard DRAM chips" but says nothing of DDR RAM."
a friend of mine got 512meg (2x256mb) for about £120 on Saturday for a new system (on Tottenham Court Road in London). I think he would have gone for a full gig, but the mobo he's got only can only 3 sets.
:-)"
Mind you, he was sensible and is running an Athlon anyway. Hey wouldn't that make a much better slogan than "Intel Inside".
reply: "don't worry mate, I've got an "Athlon Anyway
Matt B
(couldn't be arsed to dig out login details)
Yes... But would you rather have RAM thats 1.25 times faster, or have 5 times as much RAM (or have the same amount and pay 5 times less)? I guess it depends on your application, but I think that for most people, RDRAM is just too darned expensive.
Anand's benchmark result isnt suprising. The P4 *NEEDS* massive bandwidth to perform halfway-decently.
Most P4/Rambus PC600 show a fairly large performance decline compared with PC800.
The result show P4 not performing all that well with DDR memory -- which seems to be why Intel is pushing for faster DDR (PC2700 and PC3200).
DDR has about the same latency as SDRAM (slightly worse latency in some configurations), but twice the bandwidth. PC800 has about double DDR's bandwidth, but much greater latency -- at least partly because it's multiplexed and probably registered. Also, Rambus puts out enough heat to need a heat spreader -- a metal plate over the top of the chips.
OTOH, P4 systems, while not selling well due to the economy, are outselling Athlon/DDRs and P3/DDRs. The buzz is that DDR isnt profitable at this point. The next iteration of DDR will probably need a different form factor -- i.e. not compatible with current motherboards -- they've been talking about mini-DIMMs that are half as wide as current DIMMs, and use fewer chips.
You are indeed correct that the $15 stuff is really bad and for low end systems. For my own stuff I typically purchase Micron or Siemens RAM which is decent stuff. Runs really nicely =)
Actually, AMD 760-based boards have been available in upwards of a month already.
The 760MP boards are what you're reading about just coming out now, in beta, etc. I've had my EPOX 8K7A board for a few weeks now already.
your mom!
You certainly are not confusing anything with water, the brand you're looking for is Naya.
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"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
$600 does seem steep until you consider the feature set.
If memory serves, that board has 2 onboard SCSI controllers, 2 onboard ethernet controllers, and an onboard AGP graphics device. If you bought the MSI board, and then the seperate plug-in devices to bring it up to that functionality, it would come out to about the same price.
So, the Tyan board is priced reasonably given its feature set. Of course, if you don't need all those features, then the less expensive board makes more sense for you.
--Lenny
AMD 760 boards yes, AMD 760MP no. Big difference between the single-proc 760 and the dual-proc 760MP. FYI.
DDR is not much more expensive. 256MB stick of PC2100 DDR cost $65.69, exactly the same as 256MB stick of PC133 SDRAM. (see here for example: http://www.crucial.com/store/ListModule.asp?module =184-pin+DIMM&x=8&y=15). Now, considering that DDR has the same latency and double the bandwidth of SDRAM, I'd call it a good deal. That said, you will not notice anywhere near 2x performance increase overall if you go with DDR. As it stands, memory bandwidth is not a bottleneck right now. Only very few applications will benefit significantly from increased bandwidth.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Go to this page - http://www.ebns.com/printableArticle?doc_id=OEG20
128Mbit chips are selling for US$3.00 or lower in some market ! That means, a stick of 128MByte SDRam will only cost - to the manufacturer of the SDRam sticks - about USD 26 to priduce !
I foresee that in the coming months - One or perhaps two months - we will see the price drops being reflected in the CONSUMER market.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
According to this report
http://www.ebns.com/printableArticle?doc_id=OEG20
chip vendors are having a 6 to 8 week supply of chip in stock, and they are NOT very happy about this.
So.... they flood the market with cut-throat price chips.
In some spot market, 128Mbit chips can be had lower than $3 each. That essentially means, to get a 1GBYTE supply of RAM, you multiply $3 by 64, that means, for a palty $192, you'll get yourself your 1GBYTE memory.
Even when you include the packaging, and stuffs, the price won't be going more than #220.
But you better get the chips now, as when the oversupply is over, the price will go up.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Funny you should mention politics. Certainly RDRAM is better suited for the higher-bandwidth FSB of the P4 than the P3. However, when looking at DDR vs RDRAM performance on the P4, you should remember that Intel has no particular reason to make their DDR solution work very well, and a great deal of reason to show it performs worse than RDRAM. Just like their 815 (was that the one?) which performed worse than the ancient 440BX. No reason for it to do worse but for Intel not wanting it to perform well.
The enemies of Democracy are
Sure rambus is faster, but does it deliver a reliability+price/performance ratio that will attract corperate or even consumers?
:)
Faster than what? Sure, a dual-channel solution has more bandwidth than a single-channel (rah nvidia) DDR, but the latency sucks. This is why the benchmarks swing so wildly with an apps dependence on b/w vs latency. You can't replace one with the other, regardless of rambusinc hype.
Face it, today your bottleneck is the Video/Hard-drive (except for us using Ultra160 Scsi) and the bus to the outside world.
Sorry, but even with your scsi disk is still the biggest bottleneck (unless scsi somehow magically turns seek times into nanoseconds). I don't care how much data you can get me in a second -- if I (the cpu) have to wait ten million clock cycles before the first byte of data shows up, then I'm screwed.
Which I guess means I agree with you.
The enemies of Democracy are
Usually you do, except for the P4 processor. The P4 will probably never be what you want. See previous /. articles for long descriptions of the P4 problems. Rambus was just the tip of the iceberg.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Nice example for consumer grade equipment. This is not the case for performance stuff.. Example. adaptech 29160 SCSi controller. Sharing an IRQ with this beast causes a significant decrease in performance, Linux drivers will fail to function when it is shared because the programmer knew that the hardware will choke by design. now, the motherboard gladly shares ide and other devices as a IDE is slow enough to have other things happening during a transfer/access. Video capture - example card: targa 2000+ PCI. it will crank out a data stream as fast as the PCI bus can handle... now share that IRQ and all of a suddent you have frame dropouts, jitter, etc.... Here's another device I have to force to it's own IRQ (and a low one as you cant move motherboard resources off of IRQ 14/15)
If they would put all that damned integrated motherboard crap at IRQ 16,17,18 we wouldnt have that trouble..... disable USB you say? ok... funny how the IRQ really isn't released.
the current PCI specifications are fine for consumer level junk... (and hell, they want us to only use USB anymore anyways...YUCK) but for anything that is professional grade or industrial grade... you cant have something wanting attention while using the high performace items.
(Funny, the Compaq ML530's bios will force all devices away from the IRQ used by the SCSI raid controller... They know what I learned... you cant sucessfully share IRQ's on high performance SCSI devices.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Sure rambus is faster, but does it deliver a reliability+price/performance ratio that will attract corperate or even consumers? Rambus has recieved a ton of bad press over the past 6 months, and with SDRAM priced at insanely low levels (Hey, I remember buying 16 meg of ram for over $1000.00 for a customers server) only the truely retarted would go rambus. IBM isn't even using rambus in the AVID non-linear video editing suites (Got a new one here less than 8 months ago, Yup PC-133 SDRAM in there) The latest Compaq servers dont use it...
Face it, today your bottleneck is the Video/Hard-drive (except for us using Ultra160 Scsi) and the bus to the outside world. (4 100BaseTX cards on a PCI bus is not living up to it's potential)
I dont care about faster, Give me 32 IRQ'S, how about an expansion bus that doesn't suck? How about a bios that isnt a P.O.S. out of the box?
my biggest gripe is the fact that we have been forced to use 16 IRQ's for way too damned long, they should have expanded it when they intorduced the PCI bus, now we have to wait forever to have a couple of free IRQ's on a new motherboard... (asus mobo's take 15 irq's out of the box)
There was a nice turnaround in hardware 2 years ago, but it is heading back into that pit of crap that made the late 90's hell on hardware hackers.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
RDRAM sucks lots when coupled with the P4 because it has high latency. Coupled with the very deep pipeline the P4 has, this means that a branch misprediction will cost LOTS. Rembmber that the P4 fares well in very predictable environments such as multimedia.
From this point of view, SDRAM could help improve the P4's figures, since it has lower latency, thus branch mispredictions and random RAM accesses will be less penalized.
I'll wait and see.
Since I am now an expert in the stock market I can offer stock market advice to the
The problem with the comparison is that you have to use Rambust in pairs of 2, so comparing 128 meg sticks is slightly misleading. You should compare 1 SDRAM 128 at $15 with 2x64 for the same amount of memory, which makes it cost $74 as opposed to $59. So Rambust is even more expensive than first reported.
F.O.Dobbs
DDR has about the same latency as SDRAM (slightly worse latency in some configurations), but twice the bandwidth.
SDR and DDR both take about six cycles to set up the transaction, then SDR can do one transfer per clock and DDR can do two per clock. Virtually all motherboards have a 64-bit wide memory bus, so a Pentium 3's 32 byte cache line requires four transfers, an Athlon's 64 byte cache line requires eight transfers and an Pentium 4's 128 byte cache line requires sixteen. So, each SDR cache fill on a Pentium 4 should require 22 cycles (6 setup + 16 transfer), while each DDR cache line fill should require 14 (6 setup + 8 transfer), an improvement of 57%.
Rumour has it that there will be be a version without the two Ultra/160 SCSI controllers.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I wonder how long it will be until places like VA Linux and Penguin Computers have dual-athlon rackmount servers and deskside workstations for sale? :-)
Good luck with VA Linux and AMD. As far as I can tell they are as intel-only as Dell. If you ask them publically about AMD you get tight-lipped "No Comment" comments.
The buckets only held one bit.
You had bits? Why, in my day we only had zeros... none o' them fancy 'ones'! And we had to carry them by hand eight miles through the snow... up hill both ways! {shakes cane in the air}
I hate to be one of those "Back in the day..." guys, but back in the day when I bought my first RAM upgrade for a PC, I payed more for 8MB than I would pay for 512MB today. Now that's fucking progress, mates.
Yeah well I remember paying over $80.00 for 8 *K* of memory. And data had to travel over the memory bus uphill both ways! You young whippersnappers!
The number of IRQs really isn't going to affect your performance. Remember most CPUs (x86 included) actually have only a single interrupt line going into them and they then handshake with an APIC to figure out what interrupt actually happened.
If you are worried about interrupt chaining, then there still isn't much time lag there. Handling an interrupt is usually a matter of just determining if your device caused the interrupt, saving the state of the device and firing off a backgroud operation to actually deal with the data. The only delay is running down the drivers chained off the interrupt to find the one that actually caused it - usually a matter of each one simply checking a single PCI register (ie 20 clocks).
Face it, the 'shared IRQ' is simply a non-issue any more (unless you have shitty drivers written by someone who learned to code in GW-BASIC and never read a design manual). Most RISC machines work happily with very few lines and the "16 Interrupts" idea is what is supported by the APIC and not the CPU anyhow, so get over it.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
If you don't know much about hardware then you probably won't want the "bleeding edge" technology. Stick with PC133, even though the RAM is the same price, the mobos that support it are more expensive.
ASUS is a good brand. I've had a number of them and they've always been rock solid with heaps of good features. They aren't the cheapest, but IMHO they are worth it.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
What sort of performance metrics do you have to show that shared interrupts are the source of your problem? My current laptop has damn near everything on interrupt 9 (as have most machines I've seen lately), and I've not noticed any performance problems at all. Smooth mouse, smooth video, DVDs play just fine without dropping frames, transfers over fast ethernet at >8M/s etc.
Most video capture problems are caused by disk latency or hitting a page fault at the wrong time, not interrupt latency. The average interrupt latency on most systems in somewhere under 1ms - if you are capturing at more than that rate then I suggest you need dedicated hardware. What model SCSI controller are you using? In many cases IDE is actually better value than SCSI - you can capture easily to an IDE drive at ATA/33 or better.
If you really want to know the largest cause of bottlenecks then I suggest you look at register spilling on the CPU. The x86 is horribly register starved and therefore hits the cache a LOT. If that's not where you want to look, check out things like the actual transfer rate to your drives, where the CPU time is going (system or user space), how loaded your I/O busses are, what bandwidth you have between North and South bridges etc. Shared interrupts really haven't been a problem for a long time, especially on "proper" operating systems like Linux.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Part of the reason Rambus memory and the Pentium III processor didn't fare so well was that the Pentium III's front side bus was only 100/133Mhz (800MB/s and 1.06GB/s respectively) and it had to contend with a higher latency memory bus and mismatched speeds. The Pentium 4 resolves the problem by running the FSB to the same speed (but not really the same frequency) as the dual-channel Rambus memory bus.
:(
I'm still holding out on the Pentium 4 solution until Northwood (ie: Pentium 4 in 0.13 micron and new packaging) proves itself and there is enough applications/server services that are optimized for the P4. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with a dual-channel Rambus setup at work
So far, I'm relatively impress with the nVidia chipset and hope that it will help increase the acceptance of the AMD Athlon/Palimino processors.
$600 isn't so bad for such a motherboard, mostly when it's geared towards the server/workstation market rather than the consumer/enthuasists market. Dual Pentium III Socket-370 motherboards based on the ServerWorks chipsets (with on-board dual-channel SCSI, Ethernet, integrated ATI Rage video card, ATA/33 or ATA/66) from ASUS and Supermicro run for around $450+ (some even go for well over $550).
It's also not really cheap to make 6 or 8 layer motherboards that are as large as the Tyan motherboard... the number of traces on the motherboard is also quite mind-boggling since you need a lot more traces to connect two processors using the EV6 bus than Intel's GTL+/AGTL+ bus scheme.
I personally haven't run into problems with the ServerWorks chipset... but I have only run Windows 2000 and FreeBSD on servers with that particular chipset. I haven't installed Linux onto that kind of server, since the servers that had Linux on them were 440BX based :)
... But why not spend your money on a dual processor solution?
The article mentions that the full featured Tyan Thunder K7 is about $600, while the MSI MS-6502 will go for around $200. I would prefer the Tyan, but $600 is a bit steep, I hope they offer a more consumer priced solution.
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microsoft, it's what's for dinner
bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com
it's a sig, wtf?
I'm buying a new mobo, athlon cpu, and memory in the next day or two. Should I get PC133 memory or DDR? It seems that DDR is much more expensive - is it significantly faster? I'm mainly using the workstation for PHP/HTML/SQL development, web surfing, and general office stuff.
Also, my friend recommended that I get an ASUS mobo. Was he right that this brand offers good price/performance?
As is probably obvious, I don't know jack about hardware. Any pointers about the above stuff would be greatly appreciated.
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"my biggest gripe is the fact that we have been forced to use 16 IRQ's for way too damned long, they should have expanded it when they intorduced the PCI bus, now we have to wait forever to have a couple of free IRQ's on a new motherboard..."
This says two things 1) you don't understand what IRQ sharing/reentrant drivers are all about (which are NOT possible on the ISA bus, but are on the PCI bus/AGP port), and 2) that you seem to think you need to spend time configuring a PnP system. Don't try to configure a PCI system to force certain IRQs to certain devices, it won't work -- they do not need human intervention. You are obviously still scarred by the 1996 PnP implementations of ISA and OSes which are not samrt about resource allocation.
I have yet to see a modern system require more IRQs than it has because every modern PCI device can share them. I have yet to see a modern system require manual IRQ assignment to devices.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
FWIW, I bought a Nanya 64mb RAM SIMM (DIMM? Nah.) 3 years ago that is still going in a server I have running.
It didn't suck. It doesn't suck. I bought it when I lived in England, shipped it over and it's still serving up pages in Canada now.
Then again, I don't have a Gig of RAM, so I can't tell you how well it would scale...
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
From the ip-weenies dept:
In further news, Rambus, facing gallons of red ink in the 2nd quarter, have laid off 99% of their engineers. When asked for a reason for this perplexing move a Rambus spokesman stated, "The engineers were the cause of the whole problem! If we did not have to pay their salaries, we would all be millionaires! But now that Intel has violated our intellectual property by using DDR ram, we really need to tighten up and get to work." When then asked why Rambus kept their two lowest paid engineers the response was, "Well, we needed to keep them around in case one of our 500 lawyers has another annoying technical question. I hate those."
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
But hey, if you're running a cheap MySQL server and just want bucketloads of RAM, go ahead with the cheap stuff. MySQL is more likely to fail before the hardware will anyway.
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I like to watch.
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I like to watch.
And no, I'm not getting it confused with the spring water. (Hungry for swap, thirsty for Nanya?)
PC RAM has gotten just as cheap as CPU cycles and IDE disks, it seems. This is of course due the the new market for DDR RAM and RAMBUS, but even DDR RAM is remarkably inexpensive. I hate to be one of those "Back in the day..." guys, but back in the day when I bought my first RAM upgrade for a PC, I payed more for 8MB than I would pay for 512MB today. Now that's fucking progress, mates.
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I like to watch.
Yeah, that was a brain fart, I meant the 760MP. If you follow the search link you will indeed find that the Tyan board is dual cpu. :-) Word on the grapevine is that Tyan will be the first manufacturer of these beasts.
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Seems the 760 chipset is already available on the street: ugly pricewatch.com search query for the Tyan S2462. Price is about 580 give or take 20 it seems. (Of those shops I've actually directly dealt with essencom.com a few times; they seem to be a nice, reputable shop.)
(This suprised me as I thought what I've been seeing around the past few days were just beta boards.)
I wonder how long it will be until places like VA Linux and Penguin Computers have dual-athlon rackmount servers and deskside workstations for sale? :-)
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Then again, maybe that's just FUD. Tit for tat then, eh Mr Litigious Rambus Bastard.
:wq
Actually, AMD 760-based boards have been available in upwards of a month already.
Over two months actually:
uptime
9:59pm up 65 days, 3:32, 24 users, load average: 2.06, 2.06, 2.01
This machine has Asus A7M266 motherboard (which works very nicely ;) The 760MP boards are certainly interesting, but I guess that a single-CPU TB is enough for me right now.
Everyone who makes generalizations should be shot.
the really cheap ram is using high density chips. as for the comment about needing a BX133 chipset to run pc133, i run pc133 quite happily in my celeron 466, at 66fsb.
With my previous celeron 300 at 450, i ran some old pre-pc66 class ram at 100, it worked fine. Nothing like buying quality ram in the first place. Got many years out of that ram.
The problem is that the P4 was made to have a huge memory bandwidth. SDRAM and DDR SDRAM both have a lower bandwidth than Rambus. SDR DDRAM will probably have a 20% (or greater) performance hit. So... the question isn't about price/performance of only the RAM, but of the entire system. Save $70, lose 20%!
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The best source for news, computer and otherwise, is the Taipei Times. Check: http://www.taipeitimes.com/news/2001/06/05/dept/bi zfocus
"Whenever the cause of the people is entrusted to professors, it is lost." ~ V.I. Lenin
Sure its better then earlier, but the T-bird and DDR still kicks butt :)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
WTG Intel on sobering up! Now pass dat bong around!
Karma whorin' since 1999
if it's not an open and free market, then how can AMD and VIA exist and succeed? intel has no more power than microsoft or even redhat to determine what we buy. heck, if other chipset companies wanted to "improve" intel chipsets they'd be sell like hotcakes. intel can't and will never be able to do anything about it except make a better product.
Those who ride the cutting edge often get cut by it.
The truth shall set you free!
My next system will be a dual tbird, fastest I can get my hands on, with as much and as fast DDR RAM as I can aquire
I can no longer justify a single-processor solution, the disadvantages of UP far outweigh the disadvantages of SMP (of which there are few, cost and compatability are the biggest ones)
With regards to i815 and 440BX..
i815 has a one way asynch. memory controller, i.e. supports a 133MHz front side bus processor with 100MHz PC100 memory.
440BX has a synch. memory controller.
What does this mean?
Synch. memory controllers can be made with fewer gates in series, i.e. the memory controller has less latency.
That account for most of the 0 to 5% difference in performance.
This sig space tolet, reasonable rate.
Remember how when RDRAM first came out and it's benchmarks were abysmal? Rambus said that it was designed for the P4 moreso then the P3. I remember thinking that was a bunch of bs but it turns out to be true, not only that but the 10% performance difference (btwn RDRAM AND DDR)in that benchmark sounds about right if recall my impressions from some of Tom's comparisons.
I wouldn't go near a RDRAM based system but now that they have a viable platform for their product they'll never see the market penetration they now need. If I didn't hate Rambus so much I woulda considered an i850 RDRAM.
Anyone agree/disagree?
BOSTON SUCKS!
Seriously, I had to keep myself from yawning. The problem is that chip speed is far less important nowadays than it was 2 years ago. The bus speed matters a little bit, and it will be nice, but with recent Intel fiascos, I just don't see the point.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I was recently pricing computers over at Gateway, since I got my son a copy of Black & White and I can't run it on any of my Linux boxen, so I decided to donate my old Win98 box to a friend and pick up WinME on a box that matches the demand specs of the game. And I looked at all the nice 1.1 GHz Intel chips and then saw that I could buy an 850 MHz AMD chip in a box for about $800 instead of shelling out $1600 for the "faster" Intel chip that I knew wasn't really faster.
So, what I'm saying is - so what? Until Intel finds some way to deliver faster Net access, it's all a bunch of hype about meaningless benchmarks that have no connection with my reality. And I'll still buy Linux for my servers, so I really just don't care.
But it is a cool trade show, I'll give you that.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
if you already have enough money to spend to buy P4's rather than AMDs for that slight gain in performance
You mean for that slight gain in brand-name recognition? From everything I've read, heard, and seen, the fastest Athlon system on the market still equals or beats the fastest P4 system on the market in just about everything (leaving SMP machines out of the comparison, obviously). All Intel really has to offer over AMD now is the name, and even that is becoming fairly tarnished with all the recalls and such in the past few years.
>And to check to make sure that it is a geometic expression... Geometric progression.. I think you mean exponential increase.. perhaps we could model the prices with something along the lines of: Price_of_Rambus = Ae^-t/size_of_ram (Where A is very very large..) forget Moores law.. we have Digimax's law!!
The performance difference between the RAMBUS version and the DDR version.
Casual Games/Downloads
Memory at rock bottom prices, dual Athlons/Tbirds/Palamino's (just hope consumers aren't left out in the cold for long).
Two words: "Chubby Gooood!".
'slashdot, hardocp, tech-report, macslash, macsurfer, arstechnica --phew! no wonder I'm so damn tired all the time'
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
buy another stick of ram with that 70 bucks :op
I wouldn't touch Rambus with a 20 ft pole. Is it me, or do we always have to wait for the second generation of the Intel processor (ie P4 Northwood, P3 Cumine) before we even get remotely what we want?
People aren't demanding Rambus. They want something that's worth the cost!
To all of those that are not sporking this. . . All prices are subject to change without notice ;-) These prices come from our happy friends over at Pricewatch.com . :-) I like the prospects of that. For the price of One Rambus stick, I can put in nearly half a gigabyte of RAM. . . just think of how fast Doom will run. . .
Rambus - 64mb stick - $37
Sdram 133 - 64 mb stick - $9
Hmmm, that's odd, it would seem that it's nearly four times as much. And to check to make sure that it is a geometic expression. .
Rambus - 128 mb stick - $59
Sdram 133 - 128 mb stick - $15
So what do we learn from this class? Essentially that we are going to be able to have a lot more more memory running in our P4's
I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
"This is exactly the kind of behaviour that makes me hate Intel & Microsoft. This is not politics, it is clearly abuse of power, clearly the attitude of a monopolist that can't stand a bit of competition." Since when is politics NOT about abuse of power? Don't you watch the news? In any case, actually hating MS and Intel is simply ridiculous. They are merely behaving like any other major player in an "open and free market economy." This is what the market economy is all about, the companies provide a needed service or product, and the people buy from the company that gives them the best product at the most reasonable cost. To believe that this situation in the motherboard market is in any way unique, and a sign that it is a closed market, is ludicrous. It occurs any time one or two companies dominate a market for any length of time. Recall with me the late 70/early 80s, when people discovered that the Japanese could provide them with cars that got better gas mileage than Detroit even dreamed of offering. The shakeup that resulted therein led to a massive paradigm-shift in the domestic auto industry, and a readjustment to the demands of the consumer. Any time a corporation ignores the needs of the consumer for too long, it pays the price in the marketplace.
Bad experience is a school that only fools keep going to.