What would be the advantage of RDRAM with such a slow FSB?
What would be the advantage of DDR2 on an 800 bus P4?
Nothing! Intel was only trying to open the market up to the new type of RAM so it would be there when they needed it. In both cases. RDRAM was forced upon the PIII because Intel wanted RDRAM to be there for the P4. DDR2 is being forced uppon 800 bus P4 owners so it will be there when 1200 bus (or whatever) P4's are the big thing.
i840 was Intel's P4 RDRAM chipset. They purposely handicapped the performance of the i820 to make it less competitave with the more expensive i840. When people said "No thanks, I'll buy VIA" Intel was shocked! Gurus knew their BX boards worked fine at 133 bus and thankfully passed on crappy VIA chipsets, but that still left Intel out of the market!
So Intel said "You want SDRAM, you got it" and modified their i820 to support SDRAM. Unfortunately most of the boards had too much noise to allow the MTH smooth operation, and hence the MTH issue. Intel was pushed into a corner and ended up BUYING BACK THOSE BOARDS, they'd either give you $150 or a spanking new i820 board WITH 128MB of RDRAM in exchange. Ouch!
So now Intel was still stuck, but they DID have the crappy 810 chipset :tongue: So they re-designed it a bit, and came out with the 810E and 815 series. And then released a PIII 1133MHz processor that didn't work right and ended up having to BUY ALL THOSE BACK TOO!
Now, the i815/815E/815EP chipsets were good competition for VIA, but couldn't live up to the power of the old BX. And all of that came back to Intel trying to force us to use RDRAM early, just so they could get it onto the market prior to the i850/P4.
<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>
<font color=purple>I express to you a hex value 84 with my ten binary 'digits'. 
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