Trying to steal some of Intel's thunder, Advanced Micro Devices on the same day will unveil its highest performance Athlon XP2000 processor, claimed to equal Intel's 2GHz Pentium 4 MPUs. At $380-to-$390 each, the new AMD chip continues to undercut equivalent P4 processor prices.

Greg Fawson, analyst with InQuest Research, Gilbert, Ariz., said the Intel 845D DDR chipset "will finally give the market the mainstream P4 with the memory everyone wants. It should boost P4 sales significantly without Intel having to artificially stimulate the market by severe price cuts as it had to last year."

At the same time the new 2.2GHz 0.13-micron Northwood P4 processor will debut. With a 30% smaller die size the new chip should be less costly for Intel to produce than predecessor 0.18-micron Merced P4s. It will be introduced at $562 in quantities of 1000 or more.

The Northwood chip will also come with 512K on-die cache, which the die shrink processing allows. Peter Glaskowski, analyst with Micro Design Resources, Sunnyvale, Calif., said the extra cache alone will give Northwood a good performance boost.

The 845D DDR chipset also brings a higher 2.1-gigabyte-second memory bandwidth than the 1Gbyte of PC133 single-data-rate memory that the initial 845 chipset used.

Fawson just hoped that Intel would be able to produce enough 845D DDR chipsets to meet possible high market demand. Chipset rival Via Technologies of Taiwan last year brought its own P4X266 chipset to market, but Intel has sued Via for patent infringement and threatened legal action against others using the chipset.

That has discouraged all but a handful of Taiwan motherboard makers from buying the existing Via DDR chipset, even if the Intel counterpart runs into tight supply.

The biggest disparity is the lack of an integrated graphics capability in the first Intel 845D chipsets, said Fawson. "This will hold back what otherwise could be a big acceptance by corporate buyers who have long waited for Intel to come out with its DDR chipset. The corporate market wants an integrated graphics chipset supporting DDR, and Intel won't have that until much later this year."

Via already has an integrated graphics version of its P4X266 chipset, but again the Taiwan vendor faces the quandary of Intel's threatened legal action against anyone buying the unlicensed VIA chipset.

"Intel would be much smarter to settle its suit against Via and license them to sell their integrated graphics DDR chipset. That would help spur sales of the P4 into the corporate market, which should be Intel's main objective," he said.

Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) also has an integrated graphics DDR chipset which is licensed by Intel. ALI (Acer Laboratories Inc.) of Taiwan is slated to introduce its Intel-licensed integrated graphics DDR chipset for the P4 shortly.

The double-barrel Intel 845D chipset and Northwood P4 launch has ramped up demand for DDR memory as motherboard vendors and OEMs rushed to have systems on hand for the Jan. 7 debut. As previously reported, that caused the mainstream 128-megabit 16Mx8 DDR chip to have a premium not quite double its single-data-rate comparable chip.

Sherry Garber, vice president of Semico Research Inc., Phoenix, said the next month will tell whether the new Intel push succeeds in keeping DDR memory in tight supply. "If this is only a momentary spike for the 845D introduction, then we will have only a bubble and DDR prices will drop," she said.