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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."
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.
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.