A report on Semiconductor Business News has compared Intel's own benchmarks for its recent i815e chipset -- which uses PC-133 memory -- to its 820 chipset -- which uses Rambus RIMMs with the results clearly demonstrating the former outperforms the latter.

The report, which can be found here, is a further embarrassment to Intel's chipset business, which has been plagued for the last 18 months with woe related to its support of Rambus memory.

At the Computex trade show in Taipei in early June, the Intel stand was chockablock with 815e offerings from third party motherboard makers, while there were only a handful of third party i820e boards, some of which we learnt, would never go into production.

Faith in the i820 platform was rocked to its foundations after Intel was forced to admit a problem with the memory translator hub (MTH) had forced it to make a recall, as exclusively revealed here. That problem did not apply to Rambus RIMM solutions, but this latest revelation will further diminish respect for the 820 chipset.

However, roadmaps The Register saw earlier this year indicate that Intel is pressing ahead, full-scale, with the i820e platform through the second half of this year. The venerable BX chipset survives until the end of this year at least. And we've still to see how well the 815e will sell compared to the competition from plucky little Taiwanese firm Via. ®

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