The Powerful Pentium III Xeon For Servers Will Stay At 100 MHz FSB
Here we've got another example of Intel's beautiful logic. Whilst PIII will move to 133 MHz front side bus with the introduction of the 820-chipset ('Camino') in September, the large L2-cache variants of PIII Xeon will stick to 100 MHz FSB until the introduction of Merced in the second half of 2000. The PIII Xeons with on-die 256kB L2-cache (codename 'Cascades') will be launched together with the workstation and server chipset i840 by the end of Q3 1999, and they will run at 133 MHz front side bus. This is another proof that Intel is trying to fool us a little bit. We are supposed to learn that RDRAM and its higher memory bandwidth is really essential for the future, but the CPUs used in servers, where the memory load is the highest, can only transfer data over the good old 100 MHz FSB. So Intel wants to tell us that business software is in more urgent need for a higher data transfer rate than server environments? Come on guys, give me a break, will ya?
Intel Has No Plans Of Implementing PC133 SDRAM
Intel does not believe into PC133. I was told that Intel feels that PC133 is not offering enough performance gain and that it's unreliable on top of it. The protocol overhead of SDRAM is indeed a significant problem, which does not get reduced enough even though you're finally transferring the actual data 33% faster. One of the main problems of PC133 is that PC133 with a CAS-latency of 3 is performing worse than PC100with a CAS-latency of 2, but there are several other issues as well, which will become even more significant with DDR-SDRAM and DDR2-SDRAM as we move ahead.
The alternative explanation could be however, that Intel really despises PC133 because the competitors in the chipset market are using it as their weapon against RDRAM. Whichever it may be, PC133 will not be used by Intel as found in the roadmap, even upcoming chipsets that don't work with RDRAM will only use PC100 SDRAM.
The Desktop CPU Roadmap will be published later on today or tomorrow, followed by the Mobile CPU Roadmap, the Workstation/Server Roadmap and the Pricing Roadmap.
