I just heard that AMD was dropping prices Monday as well. I would also expect the 1.4 or 1.5 Tbirds soon.
(Ok, I'm bored, here comes my technical speel.
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Dinger, you are horribly mistaken. The p4 is designed for Rambus memory. DDR ram is essentially Sdram (syncronous dram) that transfers twice the data per clock. Rambus is something totally different. It transfers very small packets of data at very high speed. As a result it has very high potential memory bandwidth. Unfortuantely latency suffers in the rambus design even more than in DDR sdram. This is why the Rambus memory did not greatly help performance (in fact it did the opposite) when paired to the p3 last year. It has now been revealed that Intel was trying to just get it in production so it would be available when the p4 came out. They knew full well that it would not help performance on the p3.
It is somewhat true that the potential memory bandwidth improvements of DDR sdram (ddr meaning "double data rate") do not yield a large performance benefit. That is largely because latency is worse in DDR vs regular Sdram. As the quality of DDR modules improve the performance boost will be greater. Most current software is also unable to take advantage of the greater bandwidth as well.
Rambus ram has more drawbacks than just high latency though. (For those who don't know what latency is it is basically the minimum delay in performing any memory operation.) Rambus ram also suffers from being much more costly than ddr ram (about 2x at current writing). In addition it generates a lot of heat, so much heat spreaders must be on the ram chips. Rambus also happens to be embroiled in a series of lawsuits, and as a result they are probably THE most hated computer company on the planet. Ironically rambus ram is not used in the application it is best suited for, that being video memory. Nintendo was the first company to put rambus ram to use. The Nintendo 64 uses rambus ram. In this application it is ideal. In PCs it is not ideal and I don't believe it will ever really catch on.
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bloom25
-MAW-
(Formerly of the)
THUNDERBIRDS
