Intel Wakes Up To DDR-SDRAM

jandrese writes "According to Cnet, Intel is finally getting around to supporting DDR SDRAM in their P4 chipsets. This is a good move on Intel's part, as they need to bring the cost of their P4 based systems down to compete with AMD, and moving away from Rambus is a good start."

Comments

Isn't it too late to worry about this?

[ergo98]

Seriously when RAMBUS was 10x the price of SDRAM it seriously hurt, but now that RAMBUS is getting close to comparable, I don't see what the point is. In my neck of the woods PC-800 RDRAM goes for about 30% more than PC2100 DDR, which really isn't that much (and dual channel RDRAM is the fastest RAM platform out there). Given that the P4s one redeeming factor is that with RDRAM it has a serious memory advantage, I really don't see what Intel is thinking: Put a P4 with DDR DRAM and it'll get clobbered even more.

Re:Isn't it too late to worry about this?

[Cloud 9]

(and dual channel RDRAM is the fastest RAM platform out there).

Speed isn't everything... RDRAM has a great deal more latency than DDR. In many cases, RDRAM performs significantly worse than even SDRAM.

Besides that, there's the evil factor, considering Rambus believed more in the policy of suing for royalties as a revenue model instead of producing and selling a decent product.

Re:Isn't it too late to worry about this?

[lazyslackertim]

Come on. The vast majority of apps don't need high bandwidth memory access. Most are busy spinning cycles waiting for user input. If you are finding you are getting poor memory performance, chances are you are running a lot of apps and the context switching is making your cache nearly useless. This is also where lower latency memory helps.

The few programs which might be blocking due to insufficient memory bandwidth (databases, games with large/many textures and the like) often do have the critical pieces tuned for cache performance.

Claiming that all apps should be tuned for optimal memory access is just silly. You do it where it's easy or where it increases performance significantly. Any more and its just a waste of time and money.

Before blaming things on lazy programmers remember that developer time isn't cheap. If I routinely get things done in one day and you take five days but get 5% better performance, who do you think is getting cut next time there are layoffs?

Re:Isn't it too late to worry about this?

[scriber]

The guys at Intel aren't stupid. They invested millions into marketing themselves as a consumer brand before it was cool to do so, and it's been the best move they ever made. AMD, for all its trying, hasn't even registered on the radar of most consumers. Intel uses this to its advantage to charge a hefty price premium. After all, they're the Coca-cola while AMD is just the RC.

So Intel _is_ winning the price battle, since the winner of the price battle is the guy that gets to charge more money and still sell 80% of the processors, not the guy that sells them for half as much to push enough volume to break even. After all, Intel could sell their parts for much less than they do without actually losing money, but they don't have to.

And, as AMD's recent relabeling of their XP line has shown, clock speed is still king. Nobody has ever successfully dethroned it as the single number consumers care about above all others. Which is why Intel has won that battle as well.

P4's with DDR aren't in any way related to RAMBUS's performance as much as keeping low-margin systems affordable and still fast. That's why you'll see P4 Rambus and DDR boards out there, fighting it out for the price/performance sweet spot.

At this point, Intel is more worried about Sun than AMD, since Sun is the lone vendor not committed to Itanium/McKinley. They've also got the high-margin Xeon processors competing with Sun's mid-range offerings. This is where the interesting things are going to start happening, but you won't be hearing about it on Tom's Hardware.

Hey intel, here's a good idea to LOWER the cost

[tcc]

Put your CPU to the same pricing that AMD is doing, do an equivalent $/mflop, you'll notice how much rambus memory isn't the biggest chunk of the pie unless you go to 1GB and above.

Oh, that would chunk in your profits... right :), better Rambust than you... Oh well... if at LEAST one of you two suffer, I'll live with that :)

DDR getting more expensive because of this

[Proud Geek]

The sad part is that us AMD enthusiasts used to be able to get DDR memory really cheap because the demand was low. Now that all the P4 people are looking to buy DDR, the price is going way high. Wouldn't it be ironic if it went as high as RDRAM? That would be a real bum move on Intel's part.