X-bit labs

X-bit Labs CeBIT Hannover 2004 Coverage: Days 4 and 5

Category: Editorial

by Anton Shilov

[ 03/24/2004 | 03:22 PM ]

In our fourth coverage of European largest technology event we talk about malicious problems with Intel’s Socket T as well as prospects of overclocking DDR memory towards 650MHz or higher. Additionally, you will learn about some exciting consumer gadgets as well as a new large mainboard maker.

Table of contents:

• OCZ Brings Out 600MHz DDR SDRAM Memory
  
• Socket T – The Socket You Can Use Only Once?
  
• Foxconn Goes Retail
  
• SiS Accelerates DDR2 SDRAM
  
• Albatron Rolls Out Consumer WLAN Gadgets
  
• Gigabyte HA – a Rival for DigiMatrix
  

CeBIT ends on Wednesday, but already on Sunday and Monday there were pretty quiet there – not a lot of visitors going around the show, so, there are no problems with moving from one meeting to another because of the crowd. There are three major exceptions from the general trend – booth of ATI, Creative Labs and NVIDIA. Although these three do not showcase any really new products, they either give away some souvenirs or simply allow playing some computer games on huge LCD TVs with powerful speakers and sound enabled – that all generates really a lot of noise.

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It is a bit regrettable, but there are no big sensations at CeBIT this year – everything that is demonstrated is probably something impressive, but is certainly not something that takes your breathe away. For instance, all mainboards for LGA775 processors are only expected to be released when appropriate Intel Pentium 4 processors will be available, and that is late May at the earliest and late June if everything goes wrong at Intel. With the postponement of this introduction there is an automatic delay of some graphics cards particularly for PCI Express x16 bus. It is not much better with AMD – while PGA939 is now slated for May availability, VIA’s KT890 chipset – the first core-logic to enable PCI Express on AMD-based platforms – is only expected to show up in June and reach the market on mainboards sometime in July. The situation seems to be somewhat better with new graphics architectures from two major graphics companies, but particular details are still under wraps.

Anyway, there are still loads of exciting products demonstrated at CeBIT, so, let’s have a closer look at them.

OCZ Brings Out 600MHz DDR SDRAM Memory

OCZ Technology Group has been seriously innovating the memory market recently. Within the last couple of month the firm unveiled Enhanced Bandwidth technology as well as rolled-out Ultra Low Noise 2 print circuit boards for memory modules. Right now the company is showcasing DDR SDRAM memory modules functioning at 600MHz – a truly unbelievable speed for DDR and much higher than DDR2 is capable of achieving right now.

In fact, there is no problem to produce memory modules with high-speed DRAM components installed on a very quality PCB in order to get very fast devices. The issue is in mainboards’ power supply circuitries for memory – there are practically no mainboards with ideal RAM power circuitry that generates no noise. For makers of memory modules it means that they have to tackle the issue using all their engineering skills on memory modules’ PCBs level. Basically, this is why ULN2 is here.

At this point OCZ is not very optimistic about DDR2 technology in overall, just like some other manufacturers, because DDR2 chips are expensive and not really overclockable at this point. OCZ will surely bring out DDR2 memory modules when market demands, but currently the company is considering some higher-speed DDR-based products, e.g. at 650MHz or beyond.

600MHz DDR SDRAM modules from OCZ already exist, right now the company needs to ensure they work stably as well as play with some SPD programming to guarantee that these modules may really achieve such astonishing speed on mainboards that are available on the market right now.