I cannot possibly appreciate Intel's dealings with Rambus and its policy of forcing a questionable product such as RDRAM down the throat of hundreds of thousand of loyal customers. I consider the dirt that has been dug up about Intel's deals with Rambus so far as rather disgusting. Still I believe that this chipset could be better if Intel wouldn't fear that it could interfere with its Rambus dealings. Bottom line is that in the recent past Intel has provided a long list of failures and questionable dealings. There's of course more, but failures, flaws and questionable deals heavily overshadow all those good things right now....

One thing that I have noticed bitterly is the demise of AMD's dealings with the press. While in the past AMD was a lot more pleasant to deal with than Intel, it now seems as if the new success went to the heads of the few remaining old executives of this chipmaker. Today it's a lot more fruitful and enjoyable to deal with Intel than it is to deal with AMD....

It has replaced the handshake as a deal closer thanks to the proliferation of lawyers who think that everyone is as conniving as they are. Therefore, while companies such as 3dfx and Nvidia vie for our attention with almost meaningless PR releases about OEM design wins and strategic alliances, it might be best if all companies, not just these two, agreed to back up any such deals with a copy of the PO received. There really is no problem with this kind of thing happening because, the companies in question are public companies in the US, and they have an obligation to be truthful in their business dealings, of course, without jeopardizing their business at the expense of confidentiality....

It might not be news to the ones of you, who have been closely following the dealings of Rambus, the company that 'invented' the dreaded RDRAM memory. The article summarizes the backdoor deals that Rambus is using to push RDRAM into the market, or up the computer users rear end....

The i845 chipset is technically also able to operate with the much faster DDR-SDRAM, but customers will have to wait for this version until 2002, as validation issues or other strange dealings are keeping Intel from an early release....

Due to dealings with Rambus Inc., Intel's very first Pentium 4 chipset had been a RDRAM-solution and it took a long while until Intel had finally been willing to add SDRAM and eventually DDR-SDRAM support for their flagship processor....

It will give you a very interesting look behind the scenes of PC hardware reviewing and the dealings of marketing-departments....