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Intel To Drop RAMBUS In Favor of DDR RAM
El Pollo Loco writes: "Anandtech has this news article. Basically, Intel has decided to drop expensive rambus memory and instead to go with cheaper DDR memory."
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I wonder how much of this switch was due to the recent scandals - are Intel worried about the pockets of their customers? have they decided to stick with less, ahem, notorious technologies? are they truly concerned with the performance? I notice they haven't mentioned comparitive benchmarks in the article though... not a good sign.
If their competitors follow suit, we'll see what happens.
jer
We may be human, but we're still animals
- Steve Vai
Of course this still says nothing about the benchmarking process, should be fun seeing unbiassed reports as they trickle out.
jer
We may be human, but we're still animals
- Steve Vai
Obviously, this is bad news for Intel but great great news for the industry in general.
Intel tried to push RAMBUS heavily. In fact, it tried to ram it down people's throats (no pun intended). For various reasons, not least of all cost, not too many people were happy with this state of affairs.
I can recall when Intel were pushing RAMBUS as the best thing since sliced bread and were denouncing DDR RAM as a pile of pants but now the company's been forced to perform a complete volte face.
Why does this matter? It matters because Intel, despite it's near total dominance of the desktop market, has been shifted from leading the herd to being forced to run with it. It just goes to prove, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink it.
Of course, all this doesn't change the fact that Intel is a major player, and will get its own way in lots of other areas but it's nice to see that it can't win 'em all.
Additionally, one fewer memory standard should help drive down the long-term cost of DDR RAM further (right now it's a twice what it was in November 2001 but still at least a third cheaper than March 2001).
Good news all round. Score one for the other guys.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Since this move will only be one toward the end of the year, that will mean that the P4 will still be heavily based on RAMBUS memory.
Even though there are several other P4 motherboards out there supporting DDR RAM for the P4, the point is that Intel will have to support DDR and RAMBUS for their P4 fully.
I can see complications brewing... this should test Intel's mettle.
Otherwise, they may decide to leave the current P4 chips with RAMBUS for now, in which case the customers who bought into it are screwed.
I'm an AMD fan (see me twirl!), but RAMBUS have screwed Intel for the last time with overpriced and underperforming memory.
It's only 8:37 and Rambus stock is already down 6%. I imagine it will drop some more. They made an announcement yesterday that they're going to start making cheaper memory, and it boosted their stock a lot. I think they'll completely lose that gain. Personally, I'd like to see them go out of business just because of their crappy attitude in the industry towards consumers and competitors.
First, this is an EBM story. Why link to a 2nd hand report that has a link to the primary source right on the page?
Second, it's spurious: "An Intel workstation roadmap secured by EBN" strongly implies that this is not an official Intel announcement.
Third, while it's not such a huge deal for Intel, it's a huge furry deal for Rambus Inc., the well known firm of lawyers. Rambus Inc. is a public company, and as such has an obligation to announce significant events effecting future earnings. "A spokeswoman for Rambus Inc. said she couldn't comment on new Intel workstation chipsets supporting DDR, and referred all questions to Intel" simply doesn't cut it. Rambus Inc. might be greedy lying parasites, but they're surely not stupid enough to sit on information that they must - must - have known about prior to this (alleged) policy change.
Given that Rambus Inc. share price rose 22% yesterday based on the news that Intel had adopted the 533Mhz FSB to support RDRAM, the SEC will no doubt be having a good, long look at their disclosures and these "yes we will/no we won't" announcements, and asking who exactly is releasing them, and who is benefitting from the share fluctuations.
Let's hold fire on this until it's been confirmed by both Intel and Rambus Inc. Please. Pretty please.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
This is a really odd announcement, especially considering this article released by Tom's Hardware Guide yesterday. Basically, the article tested the upcoming P4 chips at 2666mhz and 2533mhz, and stated many times that the performance gained by using both a 133mhz FSB and 533mhz memory clock would show enormous gains over any current Intel or AMD processor. Some of the performance numbers on THG's graphs were rather impressive.
So I see one of two things here. Either this report is wildly inaccurate or misinterpreted, or Intel sure is shooting themselves in the foot yet again. As soon as they create technology that can utilize Rambus' enormous memory bandwidth, they can the technology? Something about that doesn't sound right. Intel may be dumb, but they're stubborn too. If this is true, they sure picked a hell of a time to seriously rethink their relationship with Rambus.
I agree that Tom's Rambus reversal isn't based on some kind of payoff, but if it's based on technical reasons, he has yet to share them with us. His article on the topic was just shoddy.
In particular, he kept comparing his custom P2200 - 2600s to an XP 2000+ and blaming the difference on memory bandwidth. Well, the name XP 2000+ *means* "about as fast as a P4 2000". If the speed goes up on the P4, of course the XP will lag. So if in "MPEG-2 video encoding, the Pentium 4/2666 is approximately 25% ahead of the AMD Athlon XP 2000+", well, 2666 is approximately ahead of 2000. Where does memory bandwidth fit in? The rest of his benchmarks are similarly unsurprising and misattributed.
Also strange was the fact that in his review of the uninspiring performance of the KT-333, Tom failed to take advantage of MSI's 166MHz fsb option to see what the chipset was like when driven to it's full capacity. He could've just taken one of his custom unlocked chips and adjusted the multiplier to match the speed of the normal chips at 133MHz fsb. Maybe it wouldn't make any difference, but it seems a pretty glaring oversight. Wouln't you at least check?
It's too melodramatic to argue that he's on the take. But given his previous opinions, I wonder why he's so desperate to read more good things about Rambus into his data than are really there.
Kill, Tux, kill!
Tom is not biased per say, must opinionated. That does color his reports and articles, sure, but I dare you to find one magazine that doesn't do the same.
I write for a game website doing Hardware reviews with 52million hits a month. I am just as guilty as the next guy. You can't help but be biased based on your own personal experience and background, dealings with hardware reps, etc... it all colors your reports and opinions.
Take, for example, the KT266A vs nForce 420 [tomshardware.com] test. The benchmarks show the nForce in the middle of the pack for most tests - roughly half the KT266A boards faster and half slower. And with margins of 2% in most tests. Yet the "Conclusion" was that "KT266A Trounces nForce 420D" and that "the nForce 420D is currently no match for the new KT266A". What a load of crap. Of course little things like total system cost and features were ignored - the nForce has a significantly better sound chip than the KT266A and all nForce boards have integrated network (only some KT266A's do).
Wrong... the KT266A, in terms of performance and value and stability (he doesn't touch on it much in the article, but if you have been keeping up there has been a glaring drop off in Nvidia's quality of drivers as of late, including significant deviations in their WHQL AGP4x driver implimentations which is causing a great many Via and SiS based chipset boards to BSOD in ALL ms operating systems with infinite loop errors and nv4disp.dll problems). Trounce is a strong word, but it is obviously better than the nForce (and your perception of audio is interesting and an opinion of question too).
His reversal is pretty clear, though I guess he could have stated it more obviously for those people like you that need it slapped in their face and can't just understand what they are reading. You may have a valid point, however, regarding comparing a 2600 system directly to the 2000XP, but only if you take it strictly as a hardware benchmark test and not as an example of the future months ahead and Intel's newest chips due out.
I waited until the prices dropped. When RAMBUS memory stated appearing in circuit city I was delighted. It appears that supply has finally caught up with demand and the prices appear to be as good as other RAM prices. I see not reason to give up on the speek offered by RAMBUS because of manufacturing delays.