Oeps, weer een lekkere *pets* voor Intel: Samsung (één van de belangrijkse RDRAM producenten) zegt zoveel mogelijk capaciteit van z'n Rambus produktielijnen te willen vrij maken voor SDRAM produktie. Hier de info uit een nieuwsartikel van Techweb:
With another delay of a key Intel chip set for enabling Direct Rambus DRAMs in PCs, Rambus systems havemissed the window for the Christmas selling season, analysts said, potentially costing PC makers tens of millions, possibly hobbling the upcoming launch of Intel's next version of the Pentium III, and causing at least one DRAM maker to halt production of Rambus parts.The delay could also help give double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAMs a stronger chance at becoming a mainstream alternative for high-end PCs sold next year.
[...] There will be no more wafer starts for RDRAM until we can better understand how long it will take to resolve the Camino situation," said Avo Kanadjian, vice president for memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, San Jose, Calif. "Any capacity that can be freed up will be reassigned to 128-Mbit or 256-Mbit SDRAM products. We will require some convincing before we restart any RDRAM production." [break] Dit hele Intel drama begint natuurlijk pas echt grappig te worden wanneer de Coppermine eind deze maand gereleased wordt (processor zonder bijpassende chipset...auw): [/break] While this delay is embarrassing, the real test will come later this month when the company is expected to roll out the 0.18-micron version of its Pentium III, code-named Coppermine, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64, Saratoga, Calif. That chip will also integrate the Level 2 cache, which generally brings about a 10 percent performance gain over similar chips running at the same clock speed but with off-chip cache.
Brookwood said Coppermine is the chip most PC vendors expected to really activate the Rambus rush.
"If Intel can't correct the Camino situation before the Coppermine debut, that will really throw a wrench into their plans," he said. "[Intel] doesn't even know yet what the problem is. This is an embarrassment to be sure."
