No, Micron was already a producer of NAND, but it was well behind the
marketshare leader, Samsung. I assume that the Intel-Micron linkup will
allow Intel to gain access an existing NAND design, without having
develop their own. While Micron will gain access to some pretty big fab
capacity.
I don't think so on fabs - they are (initially) to be in Boise, Manassas,
VA and Lehi, UT, all Micron facilities AFAIK. Obviously this has no impact
on chipset production. The NOR deal with ST hasn't given any indication of
production off-loading either - it seems it's mainly a common specification
where they seem to be trading some IP to come up with a common drop-in
part.
I'm just telling you what I see in my local stores around here. They're
putting P4's into the cheap $299-$750 computers these days. The only
difference between the cheap $750 and the super-cheap $299 computers is
the amount of RAM and hard disk capacity, but not the processors. The
processors are all generally sub-3.0Ghz P4's. They're competing agains
Semprons, at the same price points.
I don't believe that any of the P4's that are above 3.2Ghz are all that
common. But for AMD, the 3200+ and above Athlon 64's are quite common,
and in fact, prevalent. The Athlon 64's desktops are generally in the
$650-$2100 range: the high end of that range would of course be an X2 or FX.
I never look in local stores for computers - low expectations anyway and
I'm not into tormenting sales-folk.
On-line prices of comparable power
CPUs from both is certainly in the same ballpark.
No, FB-DIMM's claim to fame is that it can remove the interface
differences between different generations of DRAM, so DDR2 and DDR3
FB-DIMMs will be exactly the same. It's the next generation of buffered
RAM. So it should look like just a buffered DDR2 chip.
No, it provides a common interface to DDR2 and DDR3 DRAM *chips* on the
module but at the module/chipset level it's a quite different interface
from the current DDR2 channel - AMD would need a different memory
controller, with a different (serial) memory channel speed, signalling and
pin count to do FB-DIMMs. The FB-DIMM "channel" is as different from
current DDR2's as Rambus' DRDRAM was from DDR-SDRAM's; in fact you *could*
say that FB-DIMM is a "clean room" attempt at an alternative DRDRAM
channel. We'll see what Rambus makes of it as an err, infringer.
And no, FB-DIMM won't be a big score for Intel, it reduces performance,
and increases power consumption. So even though AMD is likely to support
FB-DIMM, it's future is not entirely guaranteed.
Intel seems to disagree with you and the results, even counting some
finagling on benchmarks, do not support your contention of lower
performance... a bit of extra latency gets traded for near-lossless
increases of capacity through DIMM count. For *big* memory MPU systems,
Intel may need it more (than AMD) for the moment but it looks like the way
forward in that space. I've no doubt Intel will get some mileage out of
this in holding server customers. I'm sure that Daytripper has some
insights here but probably can't reveal anything.... yet.
