Intel to launch DDR i845 chipset this month?

Hynix has been blowing its own trumpet, claiming the 1.7 million 128Mb DDR SDRAM chips it sold in July give it 45 per cent of the market.

That figure, the company boasts, leaves it "the undisputed leader in DDR SDRAM shipments worldwide".

Hynix expects its 128Mb shipments to increase considerably during August - to over three million units.

Now here's an interesting thing. The company includes Intel among the companies propelling DDR sales this month. The chip giant is, of course, expected to ship its i845 Pentium 4 chipset - codenamed Brookdale - on 26 August, but only with single data rate support.

Yet Hynix claims that "this strategic shift in Intel's position will propel DDR SDRAM into mainstream system memory applications". The said "strategic shift" refers to Intel's move away from Rambus RDRAM, but Hynix's statement could be read to imply that the DDR version of the i845 will ship this month, much earlier than the Q1 2002 timeframe everyone is expecting.

There have certainly been rumours that the DDR version of Brookdale would ship sooner rather than later, but Intel is a slow-moving beast, and we remain sceptical that it would bring the chipset's release so far ahead.

Then again, it knows how much PC133 usage will handicap the P4, and given its keenness to drive P4 sales, it might just consider a sudden shift to DDR would give the P4 a big push, particularly against AMD's Athlon.

More likely, we reckon, it will ship the SDR i845 on 26 August but announce that it will ship the DDR version in four to five months' time (ie. Q1 2002). ®