douglar wrote on 2025-07-17, 15:39:

This is a little off topic: I can understand finding sympathy for the Nurse Ratched character because she was assaulted at work by an convicted sex offender who was abusing the legal leniency granted occasionally granted to the mentally ill. However Nurse Ratched was hardly a good nurse or even a good person because she clearly lacked sympathy for her patients and her application of the rules she espoused to uphold was clearly arbitrary and manipulative. To use your words, she was also an asshole.

Sure, she was a bitter witch... But don't forget that the U.S. abolished those types of institutions altogether, which is terrible. I prefer to go back to the old system with mental hospitals that have Nurse Ratcheds, than the current system today. Bring back the straightjacket I say.

Better than just having insane vagrants all over the streets that's for sure

To be fair to Intel they did release the E7205 chipset to consumers (which was intended to be an expensive workstation chipset) with dual channel DDR support fairly soon after RDRAM proved to be a disaster.
I remember the RDRAM discussion back then, it was all about the insane price that never seemed to go down.
Reviews weren't really that bad until it was clear that it would never be anything but extremely expensive.
Now had Rambus managed to get the price more competitive maybe history would be a bit nicer to the first gen P4's.

That was a chicken-egg situation: it was so expensive because they didn't have the volumes and they didn't have the volumes because it was so expensive. Due to the royalties it would always be more expensive than equivalent amount of SDRAM, but that wasn't even the biggest factor. Intel tried to bootstrap that by ramming the Rambus down our throats regardless of price, by simply not supporting SDRAM on their higher-end parts.

We - literally - didn't buy it, and by 'we' I particularly mean big OEMs and corporate procurement departments - so where the real volumes are. Previously most had been Intel-only shops, but the price difference with other (mainly Via) chipsets became so huge that many of the staunchest holdouts flipped. This had another unintended consequence of strategic importance to Intel: by normalizing non-Intel chipsets: it vastly improved the prospects of AMD's Athlon CPU, which only had non-Intel chipsets. If you're reading this on a system with an AMD Ryzen CPU, you probably have to thank Intel's overreach with strong-arm tactics in the 2000 memory wars for AMD being around to make it...

It also fucked us now. There are only 2 chipset makers and despite both using a slightly modified pcie bus, they're not compatible even if you ignore the sockets.

dionb wrote on 2025-07-16, 10:11:

Even when i845GE came along, i850E still had a performance advantage - i850E with dual channel PC1066 RDRAM outperformed single-channel PC2700 DDR1; the i875P dual-channel DDR chipset was the first to actually beat the i850E over a year later. That was not because RDRAM couldn't go faster, it was because Intel had admitted commercial defeat and had stopped development of RDRAM chipsets.

The first Intel chipset to beat i850E was Granite Bay, which Intel ported to desktop from workstation branch for Xeon CPUs. Granite Bay had dual channel DDR266 support. Arguably, also SIS 645DX, which showed very impressive performance with DDR333.

Matth79 wrote on 2025-07-16, 01:13:

133 SDRAM is nicely balanced for a 133FSB and has good latencies. RAMBUS / RDRAM was a car crash, terrible latencies, so hot it needed heat spreaders that weren't just a fashion statement, and Intel shackled themselves to it for that generation of chipsets, and it was a wrong turn, but not the only wrong turn Intel made

I believe I recall the existence of RD to SD adapters. Btw. So if anyone is looking to ditch the RamBus.

https://www.overclockers.com/forums/threads/w … o-sdram.222963/