–i820:
The chip with no further future?
Intel’s Camino Empire started erupting quickly.
Luckily, most people did not fall for the 820 coupled with RAMBUS hype. They
decided to go for a VIA solution instead of waiting another month for the
820 release. The Camino 820 Chip-set was already delayed by several months
because of several issues, one being their RIMM compatibility problem. The
original 820 boards could not support their standard 3RIMM slot design. This
took Intel a few months until they came up with a solution. Ironically this
solution didn’t fix anything, but simply eliminated the third RIMM slot. Taking
a look back today, the Camino 820 chip-set never saw big success and probably
never will. Intel’s strategy of ending SDRAM support on their newest platforms
has become a mistake. One of the reasons for this is the amazingly high RDRAM
prices. When we say high, we are talking up to 3-4 times more expensive than
SDRAM modules with the same amount of memory. That’s something that most home
users cannot afford.
The second reason is a shame: once the i820 chip-set
was released in November 1999 it was found that it couldn’t outperform the
2-year-old BX chip-set running at 133MHz using SDRAM memory. The i820 gets
close to the BX platform when using the top and most expensive PC-800 RDRAM
memory and only PC-800 memory. Neither PC-600 nor PC-700 RDRAM will do the
job right, and even when using PC-800 it still looses in most scenarios. These
issues and several others have plagued Intel in many ways. Obviously, this
is not good for customer confidence. Day to day, Intel was becoming an increasingly
fragile company.
At around the same time,
Intel hacked the original 820 RDRAM platform and manufactured reasonable amounts
of 820 boards supporting PC-100 SDRAM memory. What was done cannot be considered
an improvement. What they did is implant an MTH chip that can read and use the
SDRAM protocol. Basically, it translates the parallel CPU protocol in the serial
RDRAM protocol and then transforms it in the SDRAM protocol. As you might have
already guessed, that option would already be a performance killer because of
several operations being added to the processing of data.
This technique is not compatible with ECC enabled
modules, making it a less recommended chip for workstations or servers that
can benefit from ECC memory. If Intel had taken some more time, and actually
decided to rework the 820 to fully support SDRAM without the need for an MTH
CHIP, we could have seen an interesting and more affordable platform. Nevertheless,
why would Intel commit itself to RDRAM when the market has shown there is
no interest in the new memory format? Perhaps it would have to do with the
fact that Intel is a major investor in Rambus, and therefore benefits from
royalties paid to Rambus. In Intel’s eyes it was not a very good choice to
manufacture a larger number of MTH enabled 820 boards nor focus on a clean
SDRAM design. MTH enabled boards weren’t considered high-end in anyway, their
memory bandwidth was in most cases quite awfull. Luckily these boards weren’t
really considered by any end user.
Last month, Intel officially announced a problem
with 820 boards equipped with the MTH chip using SDRAM memory. Apparently,
they discovered a bug causing system hangs and reboots. From Intel’s official
announcement, they stated that every single 820-MTH mainboard owner could
send their unit to their motherboard maker or in some cases dealers and in
exchange get a replacement 820 Board equipped with RDRAM memory or simply
get a full refund. As it seems now, after speaking with some unhappy 820MTH
owners who shipped their boards, none heard back about their boards for at
least 3 weeks after shipment. 
