Intel Corp faces a rough ride when it introduces its long-delayed 820 chipset on Monday. Resistance to the change over to Rambus Inc memory technology, now widely considered to be too expensive to justify the performance gains from higher bandwidth, has been growing steadily over the last six months. Prices for Rambus memory are typically around double that of synchronous dynamic RAM (although the earthquake in Taiwan has temporarily inflated those prices as well – see separate story).
Faster SDRAM technology, used in conjunction with the existing 440BX chipset that the 820 is set to replace, can equal or surpass the performance of the 820 with Rambus, says industry observers and research organization such as Inquest Market Research (CI No 3,476). Intel itself was eventually forced to acknowledge the situation, and announced its own support for PC133 synchronous DRAM at the beginning of September (CI No 3,738). And yesterday, Micron Electronics Inc said it would use VIA Technologies Inc’s Apollo Pro chipset in its next generation of Millennia desktop consumer PCs.
Micron says it has found that the VIA chipset, coupled with standard 133MHz SDRAM, delivers virtually the same or better performance as systems equipped with substantially more costly Rambus technology. By Micron’s estimates, Rambus-equipped PCs will cost between $200-500 more than comparable configurations of its Millennia systems. Jeff Moser, vice president of desktop and server products at Micro, said that the company would continue designing its PCs with the VIA chipset as long as it continues to enable better price/performance.
Other major PC makers are expected to continue supporting the 440BX chipset well into next year. At Monday’s Intel launch, 533MHz and 600MHz Pentium III chips and an 810E variant of the 810 low-end chipset for Celeron processors, are also expected to emerge.
