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."

Comments

Keep in mind the feature set of the Tyan board.

[slothbait]

$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

Re:Quite interesting.....

[Chris Burke]

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. :)

Quite interesting.....

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Nanya

[csbruce]

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!

From the ip-weenies dept:

[bflong]

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."

amd 760 boards are already available on the street

[StandardDeviant]

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? :-)

--
News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org

Re:DDR isn't that expensive these days...

[JCCyC]

"AMD Anytime" sounds better. Consider this a modest gift from me to the marketing department of AMD. Use at will. Trademark it. Create dancing funny-clad people to go along with it. No strings attached.

Price Comparison of Rambus and SDR133

[House of Usher]

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
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 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. . .