The largest mainboard manufacturers report that they are going to start shipping their mainboards based on i850 chipset in the end of this month already, and the solutions on i845E – in May (most probably in the end of May). This way, by the time Pentium 4 processors with 533MHz QP bus are launched, there should be only mainboards with RDRAM selling, and the solution with PC2100 DDR SDRAM will appear in stores about a month later. The idea of this time shift is very logical: i850 + RDRAM combination is much faster than i845 + PC2100 DDR SDRAM that is why it makes sense for Intel to let i850 go ahead so that the launching of the new processors received the deserved enthusiasm from the testers :)

As you remember, in the end of the month there should be launched two processors for 533Mhz QP bus: with 2.4GHz frequency ($562 for 1,000-unit quantities) and 2.26GHz ($423, this is what Pentium 4 2.2GHz will cost after the April 14 price drop).