DDR for Intel and AMD

that Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer SOYO intends to launch two new motherboards, one for Intel FCPGA Socket-chipand one for AMD's Socket A processors that support DDR memory. The move will introduce the SY-7ALA-R and SY-K7ALA-R, which both support 200 and 266MHz FSBs. The Intel board uses the Acer Labs ALiMAGiK chipset and the AMD board Ali's Aladdin Pro5 chipset. They will be priced at $119 and $129 respectively. Both boards will also feature five PCI slots, an AGP 4x/2x/1x slot, two ATA100 channels and six USB 1.1 ports. This is good news for gamers in that it will introduce not only memory with more bandwidth, but lower latency, which in the end proves more important. As this wordy article on HardOCP makes clear, the reason Rambus has slipped up is not just that it costs too much and has an unproven fabrication technique behind it, but because it isn't terribly low latency, and that's where things need to improve, not necessarily in bandwidth. Memory is a bottleneck in modern computing, and especially for gamers. If you are one of an elite few who own a GeForce 2 Ultra at the moment (and with them retailing at close to £400 it's unlikely to be many of you) then moving to a DDR solution will likely improve your scores quite impressively. At the moment there isn't much literature available on the topic, but as soon as we get our hands on some DDR kit, we will certainly consider the relative merits of upgrading to DDR from several perspectives.

Source - HardOCP and The Register