Intel representatives officially announced at IDF that the company is going to completely give up the support of memory technologies promoted by Rambus in Intel’s chipsets by the end of the year. This way, the over four-year story of cooperation between Intel and Rambus seems to have come to an end.

At present Intel offers two chipsets working with RDRAM: i850 aimed at high-performance desktops and dual-processor i860 intended for workstations. In May Intel will announce enhanced modifications of these products, aka i850E and i860E, which will be adapted for processors with 533MHz bus. These chipset are to become Intel’s last products supporting RDRAM.

In the end of the year, Intel will launch a new chipset generation without RDRAM support. Placer and Granite Bay together with the already released i7500 will replace i860 and i850 in the server and workstation market. In the common desktop PC market the share of i850 chipsets will be reduced thanks to i845 family, and the launching of Springdale chipset in the end of the year will finish this process. All Intel’s future solutions will support DDR SDRAM.

Nevertheless, Intel’s network products will keep supporting Rambus.

This way, Rambus’ only hope in this case remains SiS, which is said to be planning some chipsets supporting RDRAM.