Intel Developer Forum - Fall 2001: Day 2

ATI

ATI was demonstrating their recently announced Mobility Radeon 7500 at IDF. We'll have more on the Mobility Radeon 7500 and Power Play in an upcoming article here on AnandTech.

Rambus makes an appearance

In spite of all of the legal troubles, Rambus still made their usual presence at IDF as a Gold Sponsor. In terms of support, we have yet to see any signs of Intel backing away from Rambus as the ideal solution for the Pentium 4 and its successors going forward.

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Rambus didn't have much to show off other than the usual Playstation 2 and Direct RDRAM displays. This time around they showed off some 4-layer i850 motherboards that implement a dual channel PC800 RDRAM memory controller as well as a few i860 based Xeon boards.

Our contacts at Rambus had seen the 100MHz vs. 133MHz investigation we published in the Pentium 4 2.0GHz article and informed us that we can expect to see PC1066 RDRAM sometime early next year. The fact that Rambus will be producing it is almost a guarantee that Intel will be moving to a 133MHz FSB for the Pentium 4 since they are Rambus' only customer for PC1066 RDRAM. The question of when can only be answered by Intel but we'd expect it to be as the Northwood ramps up in clock speed.