Computex 2002 Day 1 - Part II: KT400, Dual Channel DDR & More

Intel in 2003

We managed to sit down with Bill Siu, the VP and GM of Intel's Desktop Platforms Group and talk shop for a while. Unlike most of our conversations with Intel this one wasn't littered with NDA dates or marketing positions on products, instead it offered us a very upfront perspective of how Intel views a couple of hot topics.

The first point of discussion was the future of RDRAM with the Pentium 4 platform to which Mr. Siu quickly reaffirmed what we had been hearing from motherboard manufacturers - after the 850E, there will be no more RDRAM based chipsets for the Pentium 4. Although Mr. Siu (as well as most people in the industry) believes that RDRAM is technically superior to DDR, he made it clear that Intel's roadmap was hurt severely by an overly strong commitment to the technology which today still isn't as economically viable as DDR.

The transition in the future will be to dual-channel DDR which can be seen in Intel's forthcoming Granite Bay chipset (see our previous page on Gigabyte). It's too early for Intel to commit to DDR-II but it seems as if that would be the logical step after DDR333 for Intel assuming that they continue to phase out RDRAM on their platforms.

On the topic of x86-64, Mr. Siu was refreshingly open minded stating that although the technology didn't make sense today it could in the future. We're getting a similar vibe from AMD about the Hammer's release at the end of this year, stating that x86-64 support will definitely not be a compelling feature for desktop Hammer ownership anytime soon. Of course on the server side of things that's a different story, but the IA-64 vs. x86-64 debate will be saved for another arena. Mr. Siu also shared our concerns for AMD's ability to drive compiler and driver development for x86-64, it seems like it will be a while after Hammer's launch in Q4 before we see x86-64 spread its wings.

As far as what we should expect from Intel, in the next year they seem to be quite confident (and overclocking tests confirm this) in the ability to hit 3GHz before the end of this year, we'll see Granite Bay debuted and Hyper Threading will eventually make its way down to the desktop (via the Prescott core). What will be interesting to see is what sort of memory controller (DDR-II?) Intel uses for Prescott, which is supposed to make use of an 800MHz FSB, if RDRAM is indeed phased out.