Naast Firingsquad eerder deze week heeft nu ook Ace's Hardware een artikel in elkaar geknutseld waarin het PC1066 geheugen aan de tand gevoeld wordt. De Pentium 4 Northwood (0,13micron, 512KB cache) zal waarschijnlijk uitgerust worden met een 533MHz FSB waarmee het prima overweg kan met 1066MHz sneller RDRAM. Volgens de reviewer een veelbelovend stukje techniek:
As clockspeeds ramped incredible fast, the need for a high performance memory subsystem increased. As we have explained before, you might not like the company's behavior in the court rooms, but the Rambus technology itself is quite promising. With the information that we have right now, it is probably the only memory technology roadmap that realistically will be able to keep with AMD's and Intel earth scorching pace of increasing clockspeed and CPU performance.
Of course, it is possible that engineers will find clever ways to decrease the importance of the memory subsystem. L2-caches are expected to grow to 512 KB once AMD and Intel introduce their 0.13-micron CPUs and even large L3-caches could help, too. Nevertheless, the memory footprint of the software we run on our PCs will always continue to grow, and therefore it is very unlikely that these measures will ever make fast memory technology superfluous.