Athlon 64, Memory Pricing

[Peter Arremann]

On Wednesday 14 December 2005 02:39, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 06:37:36PM -0500, Peter Arremann wrote:
> > Memory isn't gonna change much either. DDR2 prices will go down a little,
> > DDR1 should pretty much stay the same for quality modules. Low grade no
> > name DDR1 modules will probably even go up a little.
>
> Does anyone know when AMD64 with DDR2 interface is going to land?

The answer is all just rumors, so please take it as such.

Most people guess for Q2 2006 but recent rumors place it even earlier at the 
end of Q1. 

Basically, it seems that the start date is not going to be determined by 
technology but AMD could do the launch tomorrow if they wanted. 
There are enough chipsets out there that have been validated for M2 setups (no 
surprise, after all they are attached to the cpu with hypertransport and have 
very little to do with memory access). CPUs seem to be available too and 
mainboards from various manufacturers have been on display for a while.

There are 3 popular opinions on why AMD would delay the M2... First they are 
trying to have only 2 platforms. When they introduce M2, they want to dump 
754 and have 939 for the low end and M2 for the high end. That switch takes 
time and they don't want to discontinue 754 while there is still a lot of 
money made with that design.

The second opinion is that AMD is waiting for the next big Intel anouncement 
and use the M2 to counter that. 

The third rumor is that Dell has finally decided to use AMD chips and they 
want to be the first to sell those new high-end chips. So AMD is simply 
waiting for Dell to finalize its design and then they will announce that. 
Wish that was true - but there have been so many Dell going AMD rumors in the 
past that I'm not holding my breath...

Q2 seems like a good bet - as for the why, I doubt we'll ever know for sure.

Peter.