As it now clear, Intel does not think there is a lot of sense to adopt DDR400 memory in its current and future chipsets. Firstly because JEDEC has not yet proclaimed the standard and it is expected that the committee will have to increase the voltage as well as latency in order to provide proper stability of the modules. The former will cause them to heat, and mainboard manufacturers may have to change the design of their products, meanwhile the latter fact will bring the performance of memory sub-system down in certain situations. Secondly, Intel itself simply does not need DDR400. This year they have the i850E and E7205, both offering 4.2GB/s of peak memory bandwidth via PC1066 RDRAM or PC2100 DDR SDRAM respectively. As a result, they have no need to develop anything with higher performance – current expensive core-logic devices match the present Pentium 4’s Quad Pumped Bus at 533MHz. As for mainstream chipsets like i845PE, i845GE and so on, PC2700 (DDR333) will be enough for them, Intel says. When the company launches its Pentium 4 “Prescott” with 667MHz processor bus in 2003, they will also reveal dual-channel PC2700 supporting Springdale that will perfectly feed the CPU with enough memory bandwidth.

The Pentium 4 “Presscott” will live for a year and in 2004 it should be replaced by another addition to the Pentium 4 family. The 2004 CPU from Intel will provide 800MHz FSB and even higher clock-speeds. It definitely will need to utilise a high-performance memory sub-system and Intel is likely to adopt dual-channel DDR-II at 400MHz for this purpose! Given that DDR-II will become rather wide-spread on the market, the solution will be fast and relatively cost-effective (consider that DDR-II modules will have 240 pins).

In fact, it is hard to tell at the moment what type of DDR-II memory will become mainstream by 2004. Maybe the industry will adopt DDR-II 533MHz, keeping in mind the axiom that “People buy MHz”.