SAN JOSE -- Officials at Intel Corp. have at last confirmed that the company is phasing out PC and workstation support of RDRAM from Rambus Inc. in favor of DDR SDRAM.
Analysts said this is the winding down of Rambus at Intel, although RDRAM will continue to be supported in the niche Intel market. It marks the final chapter of Rambus' once dominant partnership with Intel, which tried but failed to dictate RDRAM as the next generation PC main memory.
EBN had reported last February that company roadmaps showed that no future Intel server chipsets offered RDRAM support, but this was never officially confirmed. Now key officials at the Intel Developers Forum here acknowledge the end of the line for any new RDRAM chipsets in both desktop and workstationplatforms.
Bill Siu, vice president and general manager of the desktop platform group, said all new chipsets will support only DDR. Mike Fister, senior vice president and head of enterprise platform group, told EBN, "DDR is the more pervasive memory, and we will go where the volume is."
Memory roadmaps show the Intel desktop 850 chipset for RDRAM will continue into 2005, but there will be no successor. The 850 will be upgraded within months to support the new 1066-MHz RDRAM chip, said Kyle Fukuda, Intel platform memory strategic planning manager. However, there are no plans to upgrade the 850 further to support the projected 1200-MHz RDRAM or 1300-MHz
RDRAM, he asserted.
The Intel 860 RDRAM chipset for workstations won't even be upgraded for the new 1066-MHz Rambus chip, said Hermant Dhulla, director of advanced component marketing. He said two new workstation chipsets supporting DDR -- Placer for Xeon dual processors and Granite Bay for Xeon uniprocessors -- will be introduced in Q4 '02. "As they ramp up, the 860 volumes will decline, so we see no reason to add 1066-MHz RDRAM support to the 860," he added.
The new Placer chipset will support PCI-X, AGP 8X, and be upgraded to support DDR266, with DDR333 a potential candidate in the future, Dhulla said. Existing 845 family chipsets will upgrade to DDR333 in the fourth quarter, according to
the Intel roadmap.
Rambus refused to be discouraged by the lack of future Intel chipsets supporting RDRAM. Steve Tobak, senior vice president of marketing, responded, "No one can predict what will happen, but I expect continued strong RDRAM support from chipset, OEMs and white box manufacturers. In face of a difficult market, the
demand for RDRAM is one bright spot. As we execute our roadmap, we expect RDRAM performance advantage to only increase."
Samsung Electronics Co. said in the last several months demand for RDRAM has increased until the memory chip is expected to account for more than 10% of the Korean firm's total DRAM production by year-end. Tom Quinn, vice president of
sales for the Sansung Semiconductor subsidiary, San Jose, Calif., said this is up from a RDRAM ratio in the single digits only a few months ago. He predicted a long life for the current Intel 850 and 860 RDRAM chipsets.
Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) of Taiwan in July launched its R658 chipset supporting RDRAM, including the new 1066-MHz chip.
Analysts said the lack of any new Intel chipsets for RDRAM was expected. Jonathan Joseph, San Francisco-based semiconductor analyst with Salomon Smith Barney, said that once Intel adopted DDR memory, RDRAM was relegated to the very high performance niche market.
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