Intel's Odd P4 Strategy Slows Down Board Shipments

Well, at first, it looked as though you would need to adopt RDRAM if you wanted to use Intel's new P4 processor. Then in a surprising (and some would say bizarre) move, Intel announced a "budget" chipset for the P4 called the i845 that uses PC133 DRAM. In Tom's look at the 845 chipset last month, he was convinced that the folks at Intel must be on drugs to release the thing because the most obvious choice as an alternative to RDRAM is DDR-SDRAM. In fact, Tom's story goes on to say that board makers already have i845s that support DDR, but Intel doesn't want any i845/DDR platforms to ship before January 2002. The only reason someone might want to use PC133 DRAM might be to recycle DIMMs out of old machines. Definitely a budget move, but one that will choke the P4's performance. Well, Intel's odd choices seem to be slowing the introduction of all P4 motherboards into the market. According to a story in today's