Intel, Rambus, 1066 and all that

TOMORROW IS THE BIG day for La Intella to unleash her 533MHz front side bus (FSB) and her 845G chip set, branded Extreme Graphics - but here at the INQ we're still trying to tease out Intel and Rambus' stance on 1066MHz RDRAM.

The 850E (Tehama-E) chipset only officially supports 800MHz RDRAM but we know for a fact that Intel has sent out 1066MHz RDRAM memory sticks with its 2.53GHz Pentium 4 to UK hacks, and we've even got some benchmarks to prove it.

Memory manufacturers still don't have a real handle on when validated 1066MHz RDRAM will be available - it's likely to be in the next two to four weeks we reckon.

So what's going on?

One UK member of Her Majesty's Press, who will remain nameless for obvious reasons, told us the following:

"I've got some 1066 RAMBUS here, that those (kindly?) chaps at Intel sent me. It's Samsung stuff and goes like the clappers. Here's the results of some tests using an Asus P4T533-C motherboard.

" Floating point throughput:
RDRAM 1066 - 3,331Mb/s
RDRAM 800- 2,784Mb/s

"Why did Intel send me some 1066 when it doesn't even support it? Your guess is as good as mine!".

We're still trying to guess, and we note that Rambus itself has been uncharacteristically silent about the whole affair.

Perhaps there's some friendly signals engineer somewhere out there in Cyberlandia who can give us the SP on what, exactly, is going on? µ

* SAMSUNG YESTERDAY released this RDRAM information, all about 40ns 800MHz for the 850E, and how it's producing that memory in volume.