Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the finally-moving-forward dept.
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."
Isn't it too late to worry about this?
by
ergo98
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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?
by
Cloud+9
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
(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.
-- Karma: Dyn-o-mite!(mostly affected by Jimmy Walker reading your comments)
Re:Isn't it too late to worry about this?
by
scriber
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
Re:Patents kill your tech off!
by
MrResistor
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The patent drove the cost of DDR RAM up so much relative to competing technologies that the tech died.
I'm hoping you meant to say RDRAM.
Anyway, the patents had nothing to do with the price differences between RDRAM and DDR SDRAM, it was all due to manufacturing costs. I remember a little over a year ago Kingston was bragging about their 30%(!) yield on PC-800 RDRAM chips. When 70+% of your product doesn't pass QA, that's definately going to drive your costs up! Additionally, manufacturers had a fair amount of retooling to do before they could make RDRAM, and high setup costs get passed on to the consumer. As I recall, RDRAM also has a bigger die size than DDR SDRAM (I could easily be wrong, it's been a while since I cared) which would also drive up costs.
In contrast, DDR SDRAM only required modifications to existing SDRAM tooling, and since the SDRAM manufacturing processes had been pretty much perfected already yield was high from the get-go.
Rambus' royalties on RDRAM were actually pretty low. I don't remember what they were, but I remember it being under 3%.
-- Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Hasn't anyone being paying attention to VIA? What about the P4X266 chipset, even Tyan has a board with it: http://tyan.com/products/html/trinity510.html
Intel motherboards and chipsets are fine however you don't have to wait for Intel to come out with a DDR chipset for your P4. VIA has one already.
(*) DDR and Rambus transfer data at both the rising and falling edge of the clock cycle, thus doubling the effective bandwidth. Bacause of that they are often reffered to as 200MHz, 266MHz, and 800MHz respectively.
Anyway, the point is that DDR has greater bandwidth than Rambus. On top of that, Rambus has a pathetically high latency. Because of that Pentium 3 systems with PC133 SDRAM outperformed their Rambus counterparts most of the time.
As an aside, Intel decided to "fix" this flaw by making Pentium 4 waste four times as much memory bandwidth as Pentium 3 -- that makes P4 highly sensitive to memory bandwidth./. linked to a very interesting article discussing the P4 architecture a while ago.
Back to the point, Pentium 4 chipset uses two channels of Rambus memory that work in parallel. That gives it 2 * 1600 = 3200MB/s of bandwidth, which is greater than a single channel of PC2100 DDR (though it still has high latency). Problem is that you need to install memory in pairs (on RIMM for each channel), and each RDRAM channel can have only two memory slots. That means you are only one upgrade away from maxing out your memory. On the contrast, each DDR channel can have up to 4 memory slots and you can upgrade one slot at a time.
Also note that NVidia Nforce does the same thing for Athlons & DDR as the P4 chipset. Of course two channels of DDR have the bandwidth of 4256MB/s).
Ahh well, I'm just grumpy b/c I convinced my mom to buy a P4T/Rambus-based P4 1.7Ghz, and now I have to ditch the Ram/Mobo/CPU to upgrade it.
I'm so tempted to say "I told you so" -- which I would have if we ever spoke.
(I'd have given her an Athlon but the dustbunnies at her place are such that I'd be afraid of her burning the place down... remember that THG vid of the flaming Athlons?)
This is about the stupidest thing I ever heard. It's like claiming that Ford makes unsafe cars because their engines fry when you drain all the oil from them. Try this: remove the heatsink and fan from your P4 and see how long it takes for it to catch fire.
-- ___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
What's wrong with the SiS?
by
diesel_jackass
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It wasn't so much the price of RAMBUS...
by
Derek
·
· Score: 4, Informative
...it was the principle!!
For those who missed it. In 1992 Rambus joined an industry consortium (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council JEDEC) made up of companies seeking to develop a *royalty-free* standard for the next generation of memory chips. The resulting standards (SDRAM, and DDR RAM) have been widely adopted during the past few years.
Then, about a year ago, Rambus let the lawyers loose. They claimed that, despite its participation in JEDEC, it owned patents that were being infringed upon by any company making SDRAM or DDR RAM chips without a license. Moreover, Rambus claimed it was entitled to damages in the form of retroactive royalty payments.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
I'm hoping you meant to say RDRAM.
Anyway, the patents had nothing to do with the price differences between RDRAM and DDR SDRAM, it was all due to manufacturing costs. I remember a little over a year ago Kingston was bragging about their 30%(!) yield on PC-800 RDRAM chips. When 70+% of your product doesn't pass QA, that's definately going to drive your costs up! Additionally, manufacturers had a fair amount of retooling to do before they could make RDRAM, and high setup costs get passed on to the consumer. As I recall, RDRAM also has a bigger die size than DDR SDRAM (I could easily be wrong, it's been a while since I cared) which would also drive up costs.
In contrast, DDR SDRAM only required modifications to existing SDRAM tooling, and since the SDRAM manufacturing processes had been pretty much perfected already yield was high from the get-go.
Rambus' royalties on RDRAM were actually pretty low. I don't remember what they were, but I remember it being under 3%.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Hasn't anyone being paying attention to VIA? What about the P4X266 chipset, even Tyan has a board with it: http://tyan.com/products/html/trinity510.html
Intel motherboards and chipsets are fine however you don't have to wait for Intel to come out with a DDR chipset for your P4. VIA has one already.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
False. Comparing just bandwidth:
100MHz SDRAM -> 800MB/s
133MHz SDRAM -> 1064MB/s
100MHz DDR -> 1600MB/s (*)
133MHz DDR -> 2128MB/s (*)
400MHz RDRAM -> 1600MB/s (*)
(*) DDR and Rambus transfer data at both the rising and falling edge of the clock cycle, thus doubling the effective bandwidth. Bacause of that they are often reffered to as 200MHz, 266MHz, and 800MHz respectively.
Anyway, the point is that DDR has greater bandwidth than Rambus. On top of that, Rambus has a pathetically high latency. Because of that Pentium 3 systems with PC133 SDRAM outperformed their Rambus counterparts most of the time. /. linked to a very interesting article discussing the P4 architecture a while ago.
As an aside, Intel decided to "fix" this flaw by making Pentium 4 waste four times as much memory bandwidth as Pentium 3 -- that makes P4 highly sensitive to memory bandwidth.
Back to the point, Pentium 4 chipset uses two channels of Rambus memory that work in parallel. That gives it 2 * 1600 = 3200MB/s of bandwidth, which is greater than a single channel of PC2100 DDR (though it still has high latency). Problem is that you need to install memory in pairs (on RIMM for each channel), and each RDRAM channel can have only two memory slots. That means you are only one upgrade away from maxing out your memory. On the contrast, each DDR channel can have up to 4 memory slots and you can upgrade one slot at a time.
Also note that NVidia Nforce does the same thing for Athlons & DDR as the P4 chipset. Of course two channels of DDR have the bandwidth of 4256MB/s).
Ahh well, I'm just grumpy b/c I convinced my mom to buy a P4T/Rambus-based P4 1.7Ghz, and now I have to ditch the Ram/Mobo/CPU to upgrade it.
I'm so tempted to say "I told you so" -- which I would have if we ever spoke.
(I'd have given her an Athlon but the dustbunnies at her place are such that I'd be afraid of her burning the place down... remember that THG vid of the flaming Athlons?)
This is about the stupidest thing I ever heard. It's like claiming that Ford makes unsafe cars because their engines fry when you drain all the oil from them. Try this: remove the heatsink and fan from your P4 and see how long it takes for it to catch fire.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/011008 /index.html
I thought that this chipset looked good enough.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
For those who missed it. In 1992 Rambus joined an industry consortium (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council JEDEC) made up of companies seeking to develop a *royalty-free* standard for the next generation of memory chips. The resulting standards (SDRAM, and DDR RAM) have been widely adopted during the past few years.
Then, about a year ago, Rambus let the lawyers loose. They claimed that, despite its participation in JEDEC, it owned patents that were being infringed upon by any company making SDRAM or DDR RAM chips without a license. Moreover, Rambus claimed it was entitled to damages in the form of retroactive royalty payments.
And then the lawsuits began....
-Derek