DDR400: Game Over for VIA and SiS. Mysterious nForce2 Still Shines on Paper

by Anton Shilov
09/17/2002 | 08:07 PM

Well, that is the end of DDR400, an unofficial standard that Taiwanese developers wanted to push earlier this year. Both VIA Technologies and Silicon Integrated Systems cancelled their future DDR400 supporting products and declined the support of this type of memory in their present devices. NVIDIA still has its nForce2 with DDR400 memory in the list of specs, however, now I seriously doubt that the company will really adopt this type of RAM for working in dual-channel configurations.

Here are the milestones of DDR400 standard that will never be available officially from this moment:

• Very early 2002. Taiwanese memory and chipset makers, including SiS, VIA, Transcend and Twinmos spoke about DDR SDRAM memory functioning at 400MHz. They knew that Intel would not like the idea and decided to implement the so-called DDR400 support in the future core-logic devices from both Taipei-based developers.
• CeBIT Hannover 2002. NVIDIA showcased their never-appeared nForce620 with DDR400 memory from Samsung working in dual-channel mode. The Santa Clara based chipset developer claimed they would start to mass-produce the nForce620 by the end of the quarter. They never did.
• Computex Taipei 2002. SiS and VIA, as well as memory makers are happy with the up and coming DDR400. They demonstrated the products and discussed the plans.
• July 2002. First independent reviewers test DDR400 enabled mainboards. They said “slow and unstable”. Chipset makers became more cautious.
• August 2002. Developers delayed the DDR400 support for the Fall line of products. Mainboard makers started to declare the support of DDR400 themselves.
• IDF Fall 2002, September. Intel said they would never adopt DDR400.

Of course, if you are an overclocker and use an expensive mainboard with loads of features, you can make the memory work at 400 MHz or even higher. But if you are not – stick with PC2700 or go to chipsets with dual-channel memory controllers.