June. AMD put DR DRAM off for a year and announced it was going to start with PC100 and then - PC133. On the other hand, IBM said that they were not going to use DR DRAM in its computers that year which slumped Rambus' and Intel's stocks. The next day IBM spokesman blamed journalists for telling lies and assured that IBM would use DR DRAM. At least, in high-end PCs.

Two days later, at Computex'99, VIA showcased its Apollo Pro133 - the first PC chipset to feature 133MHz system bus. There were also a lot of Apollo Pro133 based mainboards: from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI. SiS, ALi and Reliance were also expected to roll out their PC133 chipsets soon. More analysts agreed that PC133 was a reliable bridge to DDR DRAM rather than Direct Rambus DRAM.

Intel started dropping hints that it had always liked PC133 SDRAM and that it wasn't against its use if necessary. If that standard becomes popular, why not? It took Intel five months to come to such a conclusion. The final decision on the issue will be voiced in September at IDF. For now, Intel decided to occupy itself with VIA.

First, all customers received a letter telling that VIA's chipset supporting 133MHz system bus infringed the license VIA was given in November of the previous year. Intel agreed to disregard the fact that VIA had already sent out chipset samples to the customers, but nothing of the kind should ever repeat. Seemed like the warning didn't help, as in about ten days Intel called back VIA's license and sued VIA accusing it of breach of contract, patents, negative advertisement and unfair competition. And gave the license to ALi instead. VIA was ready to defend its rights. We already know in what way: the head of the company didn't waste time in Silicon Valley and the negotiations with National Semiconductor were about to lead to actual results.

Meanwhile Intel was still working on i820. The B0 version was ready, although it was just a little better than the previous one. B1 again aroused negative comments. At the same time, although the chipset was still under development, Dell announced a new workstation family supporting DR DRAM, Precision 220, 420, 620, which was due in September.

July. Intel got a few reasons for joy: it could show to the customers several i820 based mainboards from big Taiwanese companies. They even showed an ASUS mainboard working. While Intel continues polishing off the chipset, VIA, guarded by National, officially announces Apollo Pro133 and begins shipments.

August was rather calm. And then September came.

September. At the Intel Developer Forum taking place on the first days of the month, Intel once again showed a system with 800MHz DR DRAM and announced that they were going to roll out a chipset with PC133 support in the beginning of the year 2000. It was there that Dell demonstrated the test results of DR DRAM vs. PC100 SDRAM that showed no great difference between the two memory types in available applications. Two weeks before the i820 launch, the test results appeared on various sites. And as the drivers got improved with the time, the results grew noticeably better. ASUS, AOpen, ABIT, Chaintech made public their i820 based mainboard specs.

Like the bolt from the blue: a weak before the i820 launch Micron said it preferred Apollo Pro133A to i820 for its PCs. They said it was the more attractive price-to-performance ratio. According to Micron, the difference was only 2-3% in typical business applications. Micron was the only big PC maker to listen to common sense. All the others listened to Intel.

And they paid dearly. A few days passed and Intel delayed i820 launch due to an uncovered design error: a problem with the third RIMM slot that led to system malfunctioning even when the slot wasn't used (memory bit error). By some estimates, it resulted in mainboard makers losing about a million of i820 products. Assume that the average price of a mainboard like that is around $100, the total loss can be evaluated as $100 million. At that time the memory makers were already not very eager to work with DR DRAM because of the SDRAM price growth (we are talking about the autumn of 1999!) and now they lost even the slightest interest in this product. They switched the production lines to the manufacturing of 64MB SDRAM for an indefinite period of time. Well, they had to cover the losses as every silicon wafer that was dedicated to DR DRAM turned to be lost profit.