As we know, Rambus memory is dying out, it generally has no perspectives on the PC market and soon we will forget about it like we forget our awful dreams. Nevertheless, Steve Tobak was quite right saying that RDRAM popularity would increase in the near future. I do not think that the market share of RDRAM will rise, however, 32-bit RDRAM modules will, at least, be discussed by analysts, testers, managers and other people from inside the industry. The popularity, as you definitely know, does not necessary mean that a lot of people start using something: they start talking about it. For example, not a lot of you listen to pop-stars from the eighties nowadays, but you definitely can name some of them and even discuss them if they appear on public. Almost the same happens with Rambus: I hardly doubt a lot of you will buy a platform that supports such type of memory after the Granite Bay is released, however, I will have to post the news about Rambus and you will have to read them. As a result, we can consider Rambus memory to be popular.

Today I found out that MSI has announced its 850E Max mainboard for the Pentium 4 processors with 32-bit RIMM memory modules support. Although only Samsung now produces such modules (Kingston just seems to resell them under their own brand-name), 32-bit modules have numerous advantages over the 16-bit ones. Firstly, there is no need to install two of such modules, secondly, they are a lot easier to cool down due to improved packaging, as a result, they are more oveclockable, finally, one such module definitely costs less than two ordinary modules. MSI is the third company to announce a mainboard with 32-bit RIMM support, the first was ASUS (see this and this news-stories) and the second was EPoX (see this news-story). Here are the brief specifications of the newcomer:

• Supports Socket 478 Pentium 4 / Celeron processors with 400/533MHz FSB with 3.06GHz clock-speed and above;
• Can take advantage of the CPUs with the Hyper-Threading technology enabled;
• i850E chipset, equipped with ICH4 I/O Controller;
• 2 232-pin RIMM slots for up to 2GB of PC3200 or PC4200 RDRAM (533MHz FSB) or PC3200 RDRAM (400MHz FSB);
• 5 PCI slots, 1 CNR slot and 1 AGP 4x slot;
• 2-channel ATA-100/66/33 integrated controller;
• 4 USB 2.0 ports;
• Optional 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet adapter;
• Additional MSI’s features like D-Bracket 2 (optional), Live Update 2, Fuzzy Logic 4 and so on;
• PC 2 PC Bluetooth solution that allows to communicate with another computer or different mobile devices;
• ATX Form Factor.

Information about pricing and availability was not touched upon.