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Intel To Drop Rambus Exclusivity, Support SDRAM
Overload128 writes "Over on ZDNet, there's an article detailing Intel's plan to let Rambus memory stand on its own. It seems that it will stop bundling RDRAM with Pentium 4s and stop giving rebates to OEMs that use P4s and RDRAM. They are also releasing a new chipset soon, called 845 that will support SDRAM (SDR) with DDR support for P4s not far down the line."
Rambus RAM is nowadays well under $1/MB (the Chip Merchant, for instance, sells 256MB of PC800 RDRAM for $170) - the only thing that makes it look expensive now is the utter collapse of the DRAM market. About six months ago, that would have been a reasonable price for PC133 SDRAM.
And Rambus has some technical strengths, too, when matched with a chip design like the P4 - the max bandwidth of RDRAM is higher than equivalent (PC133 DDR) SDRAM, though latency is higher. THe problem with Rambus was twofold:
First, the horrible business practices of Rambus, the company.
Secondly, when Rambus finally became available to the PC market (with the i820 chipset), the platform was so underwhelming that Rambus was effectively squashed. That was when the company turned their attention to litigating rather than working to improve the product - and we all have seen examples of companies that lead through legal agtion. They die.
And now that Intel is going to ship Brookdale, they might start selling some P4 chips at last. I know that, at least at my shop, we've held off entirely on PC purchases this year (except for a couple of servers and laptops), in order to wait for a viable P4 platform. I'm sure I'm not the only one - expect Intel's sales numbers to start rising again and some of the top-tier PC vendors to show signs of breaking out of their slumps. I, for one, have about 100 PCs to buy once there's a product worth buying.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The comment from the submitter makes it seem as if this is something new and important. This is actually really old news. Intel's 845 (Brookdale) chipset, which supports regular SDRAM and DDR has been in the works and well known for a while now and even benchmarked. Intel is probably initially only releasing it in the SDRAM flavor because of exclusive contracts with Rambus Inc. It is expected that in less than a year the DDR version will be out. Intel publically stated they are less than pleased with Rambus Inc. a long time ago.
As another poster mentioned the performance of the P4 with SDRAM is terrible. This is because the P4 was designed for memory with high bandwidth such as Rambus RAM and DDR as opposed to regular SD RAM. Tom's Hardware, perhaps the foremost Rambus hater, has an article on the 845 chipset and its very poor performance with SDRAM. Ace's Harware also has a summary.
All and all Intel's relationship with Rambus and use of Rambus RAM has been very foolish. The P-III was not designed to take advantage of the high bandwidth of Rambus so the improvements versus SDRAM were limited and the price of Rambus made VIA's competing SDRAM chipsets and AMD's solutions much more attractive. Now that Intel finally has a chip (P4) for which it makes sense to use Rambus RAM, Intel is slowly moving toward abandoning Rambus probably in favor of DDR. Although, given how hated Rambus is among RAM makers and the continued superior price-performance of DDR RAM, Intel's moving away from Rambus makes a lot of sense.
At first this might seem like a good move, until you remember the only current selling point of the P4 is memory bandwidth (until SSE2 is mainstream). So effectively, the took the best feature and killed it to save on costs to the consumer. Too bad most consumers will see "1.8ghz now with 128 megs of SDRAM!" and buy it because they heard SDRAM is cheaper than RDRAM, yet the 1.8gig CPU is over $500.
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Brookdale was already in Intel's roadmaps for a long while. They're just waiting for their contract with Rambus to end, since it's preventing them from releasing DDR products.
Plus, they designed the P4 from the ground up to support RDRAM. It'd be just stupid to quit supporting them now, that it's becoming almost affordable to buy Rambus memory.
Personally, I loathe Rambus as much as the next guy, but if you think rationally, this decision should have been taken by Intel a long time ago -- now it doesn't make sense anymore.
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This statement is one I've run across all too often. I've used AMD processors in WIndows and Linux systems for years since the K6 days. I'v enever had a compatability problem (OK - the linux kernel developers blacklists the AMD Irongate USB support for one release till they got specs to fix a bug)
Why is this opinion that AMD stuff will cause all sorts of compatabiltiy problems still prevelant? I mean AMD was a key WIndows 2000 partner with Microsoft to ensure Athlons ran WIndows 2K flawlessly. I can't remember that last time I saw a widespread AMD only problem - yes the VIA chipsets have had a few problems with the newest linux kernels - but widespread - well, not from what I've seen and now there are MANY vendors with chipsets out there.
So is this still a major issue - If it was I'd expect to see the HW review sites freaking out about all teh compatability rpoblems with AMD products. I jsut haven't seen it except when folks say it because they read it somewhere. THoguhts?
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