No RDRAM - No Problem

Having made a firm commitment to RDRAM hasn't stopped Intel from licensing Pentium 4 chipsets to third party chipset manufacturers such as SiS. So, you are going to get DDR, and SDRAM Pentium 4's with Brookdale, but that's not until the third quarter this year, and even then, it still might get pushed back. This is the pragmatic side of Intel. The side that knows AMD is breathing down its neck. The side that is hedging its bets. Is Intel going to make it tough on the RDRAM alternatives? Yup. Will Intel back off it once it sees that it has no other choice but to embrace DDR in 2002? Yup, but not without a fight on RDRAM.

Interestingly enough, Jon Kang, Senior Vice President of Samsung's Memory Division summed it up nicely by saying that the choice of memory was application dependent, but that Samsung, the world's largest RAM supplier, was poised to deliver all the RDRAM that a big Pentium 4 ramp up would need. Yet, he also outlined that Samsung was in there with DDR as well so, even on an Intel stage, the memory guys were not going to concede that RDRAM was a done deal. They just said that it was getting ready for the big time, and that if Intel wanted to push it out in volumes, they could meet the demand. Dual channel DDR200 is going to have the same bandwidth as dual channel RDRAM. It may have a slight price advantage. It's there, too.

Samsung's take is that memory is going to be driven by application. Intel kept saying as much for its strategy. You want office, wait for Brookdale and SDRAM on Pentium 4. You have "high bandwidth" apps, then you go RDRAM. Of course, Intel also defines high bandwidth apps as being digital photography, and digital editing, and even digital audio apps. But we'll address the consumer high performance conundrum when we look at the Extended PC concept in Part II of our IDF round up. Let's just say, we don't buy that demand for Pentium 4 with RDRAM is going to be driven by digital video and photography in the consumer space, and by peer-to-peer applications in the corporate world (more on that in Part II, as well).

We've come a long way since EDO DRAM. If you compare EDO to SDRAM you go from a single memory block and peripheral circuitry to a memory array, peripheral circuitry AND high speed logic. Then we go from single data rates, to double data rates, to quad data rates. Samsung is going to have the first 1 GHz RDRAM part this year. It all adds up to some significant investment in chip technology, and none of the memory vendors are going to want to see dominance by a single memory type, or low volumes that impact overall pricing. We would really love to know what is going to drive volume RDRAM adoption on the apps side. I mean, we didn't see a heck of a lot of gaming going on at this IDF. We saw the Windows XP demo, and that didn't blow us away. We saw endless video and audio apps running on various Intel CPUs. We also saw NVIDIA, and you look at what they're doing with their latest iteration of GeForce , think about X-Box , and you got to be wondering what's going on to drive the high performance segment of the PC market.

To get the answers to some the questions raised by Intel's roadmap and strategy we have to look at how OEMs are being encouraged to spec out their systems. We are also going to look at how the "rich client", the beloved PC, is going to fit into Intel's new, digital world. We think you will be surprised, if we read between the lines of the presentations at IDF correctly.

Please follow up by reading IDF Spring 2001 Part II: USB 2.0 and Extended PC .