X-bit labs

SiS and VIA decline DDR400 Support!

Category: Other

by Anton Shilov

[ 08/31/2002 | 08:48 PM ]

Earlier this year big memory-makers and Taiwanese chipset-developers were very optimistic about DDR400 SDRAM and planned to promote it as a new industrial standard. The time has dotted all i-s and now even VIA and SiS, who always support almost all innovations in order to be able to implement something new in their core-logic products, do not want to declare DDR400 (or should I say PC3200?) support in their latest SiS648 and P4X400.

The problem that now forces the mentioned Taiwanese companies to take their words back is JEDEC’s desire to figure the PC3200 standard this September. According to memory-makers, DDR400/PC3200 specifications may be a bit different from what the developers originally planned. For instance, some say that electrical interface and timings are going to be changed. It means that some current DDR400 products will not receive the right to be called so. In order not to bring muddle with memory standards on the market, VIA and SiS have declined to support DDR400 in already announced P4X400 and SiS648 devices. Both companies also did not officially offered DDR400 in their latest Socket A products.

Before JEDEC announces the final specifications of PC3200 DDR SDRAM, chipset developers are not likely to officially implement it in their devices. I wonder what will they do if JEDEC refuses to ratify the standard. Some mainboard makers already certify some DDR400 modules to guarantee their ability to work with their boards. It seems that VIA, SiS and NVIDIA may later launch their own certification programs to ensure that there are quality DDR400 modules on the market.

To sum up, although there are a lot of mainboards and core-logic sets that allow memory to function at 400MHz clock-speeds, officially this type of memory in not supported and it is not yet known if it officially will be in future.