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DDR won't dominate until 2003 – Infineon

Needs Pentium 4 support to become mainstream

Infineon has declared that 2003 will be the year of DDR SDRAM. Two years down the line, DDR will have taken 50 per cent of the memory market and displaced single-rate SDRAM as the leading memory product, the company says, according to DigiTimes.

At the same time, Infineon will be reducing its focus on memory products from accounting for around 45 per cent of its revenue to under 30 per cent, the chip maker said.

So what's taking DDR so long? The relative scarcity of DDR-based chipsets, apparently. Prices may fall to within a gnat's willy of the cost of SDRAM by the end of 2001 - or so many DDR players, such as Micron, predict - but the big leap won't come until Pentium 4 chipsets that use DDR memory come to market. What DDR chipsets there are are aimed at the AMD Athlon. But for all AMD's success in growing its marketshare, DDR has only around five per cent of the memory market.

VIA is pushing ahead with its unofficial - inasmuchas Intel hasn't given the product its blessing - P4+DDR chipset, the P4X266, as are SIS and Acer with their Intel-okayed parts, but none are likely to ship before Q4, sources close to the companies have said.

Come 2002, however, and the arrival of the DDR version of Intel's 845 chipset, aka Brookdale, and DDR usage will increase considerably, Infineon reckons.

Memory's shift to a lower contribution to Infineon's overall revenues will come, the company said, as a product of falling prices and a move to grow its networking and wireless comms chip businesses. Infineon expects these three areas to each contribute just under a third of its overall revenues. ®

Related Links

DigiTimes: Infineon: DDR will be the mainstream product in 2003 and Infineon to reduce DRAM revenue proportion to 30%

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