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Gartner jumps on ‘RDRAM dead’ bandwagon

Dead in 6-8 months, apparently

Analyst group Gartner says that RDRAM will be dead in six to eight months. At the Gartner Symposium/ITXpo in Cannes yesterday, senior analyst Kevin Knox told delegates:

"Rambus is pretty much dead. It only made it into some areas such as high-end workstations, but it is dead for the mainstream PC. It is probably not a wise decision to carry on supporting this technology."

It's worth pointing out that when Knox says 'Rambus', he's talking about RDRAM, rather than Rambus the company, which looks set to generate large sums of cash from both licensing deals and law suits. Indeed, Knox himself is at some risk of receiving a snottogram from Rambus' monstro legal department for his confusion between the company name and its flagchip product.

Since Intel backtracked on support for RDRAM, moving it from the best-thing-since-sliced-bread category to the whoops-we're-sorry-we-ever-got-involved file, DDR SDRAM has become flavour of the memory month, with arch-rival AMD launching the 760 DDR chipset to wild applause last week.

Chipzilla has announced that next year, both Pentium 4 and PIII will have support for DDR, either though home-grown chipsets or from third parties such as VIA, despite an agreement with Rambus Inc that it won't do any such thing until 2003.

And please, Rambus aficionados, if you take offence at any of the above, don't flame us, flame Gartner. ®

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