HP to intro non-i840 workstations on 13 December

The Intel i840 chipset seems to be dogged by the shadow of Caminogate, if the latest information from HP is anything to go by. A representative from HP US today confirmed that his company will introduce single and dual workstations based on the RCC (Reliance) chipset on the 13th of December, rather than on the i840 Intel chipset. He said that the machines will use Intel Coppermine technology at high speeds and that the reason HP has chosen RCC, which uses synchronous memory (SDRAM) rather than Direct Rambus memory, is because high end users get faster throughput with the former memory devices. He also denied reports on US wire news.com that there was no great take-up of the Cascades Xeon technology Intel released earlier. In contrast, he said HP was committed to providing high end Intel chips in its Visualize line of workstations and was considering upping its manufacturing in the middle of next year to cope with increased demand for x.86 based machines. HP will use Copperhide, which he described as the lower end version of Coppermines using the i820 chipset, although he said the faster speeds, such as 733MHz, were unlikely to arrive until the beginning of next year. Intel also denied there was poor takeup of Xeon technology and said that market research company IDC had recently published a report showing the gains x.86 technology is making in the workstation space. ®