According to a report at EBN, Intel will accelerate the debut of its DDR SDRAM chipset for Pentium 4 CPU, aka Brookdale, pulling in the launch date from Q1 2002 to October of this year. At first Intel planned to launch only SDR SDRAM Brookdale version in October 2001, when 0.13 micron Pentium 4 aka Northwood is to be announced. This way, the value chipset for Northwood was supposed to be SDRAM Brookdale, while the High-performance version – Tehame-E, a version of Rambus i850 adapted for Northwood version. Now DDR Brookdale turns out capable of satisfying the demands of those users who look into building High-End systems and Tehama-E appears absolutely unnecessary. However, in order not to upset those, who are already owning Rambus systems, Intel will still introduce Tehama-E, those it is very unlikely to be a great success. So, Brookdale will be the first Intel chipset supporting DDR SDRAM and will boast a lot of cool features, so that the other companies also introducing Pentium 4 chipsets will have a lot of causes for concern. Just think: Brookdale will support up to 3GB memory, ECC, 6 USB 2.0 ports and, maybe, an integrated graphics core as well.
Taking into account that in Q4 2001 Intel will be offering 2GHz Pentium 4 manufactured with 0.13 micron technology, featuring 512KB L2 cache and powered by DDR, AMD will be able to compete with Intel only by means of flexible pricing strategy, because it has only Athlon 1.7GHz scheduled for this time period.