At the IDF Intel unveiled new details concerning the upcoming Brookdale chipset, as Techweb reported. The company once again confirmed that the first version of the chipset supporting PC133 SDRAM would come out in H2 2001, and the second one supporting DDR SDRAM – in the beginning of 2002. However, one very unpleasant issue cropped up: Intel isn’t going to implement PC2100 DDR SDRAM support. Brookdale will work only with PC1600 DDR memory.
To tell the truth, we don’t really understand what forced Intel towards this decision. What’s the use to limit the memory bandwidth in a system with a very fast processor? Moreover, as we know, the performance of PC1600 DDR SDRAM in real applications is almost the same at that of PC133 SDRAM (because of relatively high latency).
All in all, Intel seems to be offering us another riddle, which may turn out too hard to solve even for Intel. The only more or less logical explanation is the fact that Intel is suffering problems with the implementation of DDR SDRAM working asynchronously with the FSB, which equals 100MHz for the today’s Pentium 4 processors.