Intel Developer Forum Conference - Spring 2001: Part 1

No DDR they say!

We went to Intel and presented them with the claims from motherboard manufacturers that their own DDR P4 chipset (Brookdale) was to be released later this year instead of 2002 as Intel's roadmap had originally shown.  Intel did not so much as flinch when confronted with this and they stood their ground stating that Brookdale DDR would be a 2002 solution. 

The Brookdale SDR solution, using PC133 SDRAM, is still on track for a release later this year.  However we can only begin to imagine what kind of performance hit the Pentium 4 will take by effectively reducing its memory bandwidth to 1/3 of what it currently is.  This may be a reason for Northwood to have 512KB L2 cache, to prevent it from having to go to main memory across a 133MHz bus.  For the market segment that the Brookdale SDR solution is aimed at (entry-level P4 systems) it will be rare that large datasets would come into play thus making a 512KB L2 cache a perfect match for the platform.

Intel is continuing to push for DDR SDRAM in their upcoming server platforms, and we will discuss the reasons why shortly.