Because of this and several other Rambus-820 issues such as high prices, Intel
had to take a step further and seriously think of their future, especially
focusing on their customers who started being disgusted with Intel’s strategy.
Months later, Intel started noticing that RDRAM was a no go for the majority
of consumers. I feel bad for the people who actually spent money on RDRAM.
Intel finally and begrudgingly decided to take a step that led them to update
their road map which previously was based on motherboards designed to use
RDRAM memory. Intel has decided to add a SDRAM solution.
-i815, i815E: The RDRAM terminator?
All of this takes us to the new 815 Solano chip-set
that was announced last month at Computex. The 815 chipset was announced in
early July 2000. The 815 platforms came to the market to give the expensive,
Rambus enabled, 820 platforms a break. That’s how we the consumers see it
anyway. Intel had a very different point of view last month when they finally
released this RDRAM killer. Intel stated a few times that the 815 chip-set
would be a low cost solution, and to prove that, they included an integrated
low cost video solution and in a way limited its memory expansion to today’s
minimum expansion specs. To all of that, as Tom's hardware announced it last
month, it seems as if Intel is not planning to release a large amount of these
boards. Why you ask? Well, if we explore the situation a little bit deeper,
the i815 could end up being the 820 terminator. The 815 will remain an interesting
solution because it features an AGP port that can let you host any kind of
video card and the 815 in most cases outperforms the VIA133A chip-set. One
last thing, the 815 is the only Intel board which officially supports the
133 MHz FSB, and subsequently, PC133 memory.
The Solano 815 platform offers everything a VIA133A,
i810E, BX chip-sets combined all together has to offer, and more. Just as
with the 133A, the Solano 815 chip-set are available under two different phases,
first is the 815 and the 815E. What differs both is their South Bridge. The
most advanced version with the E is using a newer I/O Controller Hub, also
known as ICH. The newer ICH stepping name is ICH2. The ICH2 offers several
newer improvements over ICH such as the use of four USB ports, CNR slots and
support of the newer ATA100 standard. The I/O controller hub2 can be found
in newer Intel platforms such as the i840 and i820 with the new E stepping.
The ICH version in the other hand offers similar features to today’s recent
available platforms such as the VIA133APRO chipset. The older ICH supports
the standard features as ATA/66, two USB ports. A reasonable money difference
between both versions could be noticed. It will be up to you, the user, to
decide which will fit your needs. Features such as ATA/100 might be useless,
but four USB ports on board could definitely come in handy these days.
Mainboards featuring the 815 chip-sets will be reasonably more expensive than
any other VIA133A boards on the market. The price will be very close to the
820 boards. VIA133A boards will remain the best product money can buy forl
at least another few months. 
