DDR For Pentium III - VIA's Apollo Pro 266 Chipset

Introduction

We have already mentioned it before; DDR-memory is not really anything brand new. It has been used very successfully on high-end 3D graphics cards for a couple of years, but it took until last October, that DDR-memory finally made its way to the system memory banks of motherboards.

Theoretically, DDR-memory is offering double the bandwidth of equally clocked single data rate memory such as the well-known PC133 SDRAM. That is why the performance expectations of systems equipped with DDR-SDRAM main memory were pretty high. Unfortunately the expectations haven't quite been met.

First There Was DDR For Athlon

While the launch of the first PC-chipset with DDR-memory support is lying back two months now, it is still close to impossible purchasing any motherboards or the actual DDR-memory anywhere. Problems with AMD's 760 DDR-chipset and the unavailability of Athlon-processors with 133 MHz processor bus clock delayed the actual introduction of DDR-memory to the PC-market.

In late 2000 ALi had released its MaGiK1 chipset, which also offers DDR-memory support, but unlike AMD's 760 chipset it has not yet been able to show any major performance boost over Athlon platforms that use the well-known PC133 memory.

It seems as if DDR-platforms for Athlon are slowly but surely becoming available now offering you a 0 - 10% performance increase over VIA's Apollo KT133A PC133 solution, depending on the DDR-memory, the motherboard and the application used.