Team DDR wins game, chipset and almost match

IT'S EVIDENT FROM recent Intel roadmaps seen that the love-love relationship the chip firm had with Rambus over RDRAM has hit the end of the road.

In the late quarter of this year, Intel validated its 850E Rambus RDRAM chipset for PC1066, and the latest steppings support hyperthreading too

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But according to the roadmaps, the 850E only has one quarter to go, that's only four months, before Intel will replace it with the Canterwood chipset.

As we reported earlier this week, Canterwood, an ICH5, Serial ATA chipset, supports dual DDR 400 and 333 with ECC, "turbo mode", AGP8X and CSA, as well as the new 800MHz front side bus.

The ironic thing about the Intel-Rambus affair is that quite a few people in the industry now believe that RDRAM does offer the best and most scaleable memory type for the PC platform as clock speeds rapidly increase.

A year ago we reported on signal difficulties with DDR memory types that are only now being properly addressed.

We believed that Intel would keep the 850E ticking over for a little while longer but that no longer appears to be the case, unless it changes its mind again, of course.

If RDRAM is the best memory type for PCs, then the only chipset manufacturer to support it will be Silicon Integrated Systems (SIS), which has definite plans for one RDRAM chipset and tentative plans for another in 2003.

Source : Inquirer