By Dan Jones

Intel Corp will finally launch the much-delayed 820 Camino chipset at Comdex on November 15, according to sources. The version that will hit the streets will not be the three RIMM version which caused Intel so many technical heartaches, but a validated two RIMM set up. Some industry analysts suggest that by the time that the 820 is on the market, its thunder will have been stolen by the Apollo PC133 chipset from rival Via Technologies Inc and Intel’s own 840 chipset, which is intended for workstations.

At an event in Seoul, Korea, Intel CEO Craig Barrett, said that the 820 will be launched in a couple of weeks time. The official company line, reiterated by chipset spokesperson Dan Francisco, is that the controversial component will be out by the end of the quarter. A Comdex launch would likely see Intel ramping up volume production for the end of this year.

However, the lower price of synchronous DRAM PC133 chips – which the Via Apollo uses – as opposed to Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) may make the Taiwanese design more attractive to margin-conscious OEMs. Especially now that some research studies (CI No 3,746) suggest that Rambus is slower than existing PC100 SDRAMs for some ‘real world’ applications.

OEMs looking to make performance PCs may do better to consider the 840 workstation chipset, according to Peter Glaskowsky, analyst at the Microprocessor Report. The 840 costs more than the 820 will, but it’s a vastly superior chip set. Used with SDRAM it can exceed the performance and undercut the total price of an 820-based machine with Direct RDRAM, said Glaskowsky. It has much more I/O capacity because of its second PCI-64/66 bus as well. If I were an OEM, I’d be making midrange desktops with the 840 even though Intel aims it at higher price points, he said. [Camino] is not destined to be a very popular chip set because of the high cost of Direct RDRAM, he said.

Separately, reports have reached us of a new code-name on the Intel roadmap – Amador. Given Intel’s penchant for naming chipsets after towns, the 840 was dubbed Carmel, its seems likely that Amador is a another bump on the chipset roadmap. Sources tell that the code name definitely doesn’t refer to the PC133 SDRAM chipset that is due from Intel in the first half of next year. However, Intel was talking up the possibility of developing a chipset for servers using double data rate SDRAMs (DDR-SDRAMs)- also known as PC266 – at the Intel Developers Forum in September. Francisco said that Intel does not comment on unannounced products.