Mosel Vitelic announces PC-133 support

Computex Taiwanese memory company Mosel Vitelic announced today that it would provide support for the PC-133 standard with 64Mbit and 128Mbit synchronous DRAMs. And the company furnished facts and figures about PC-133 vs Direct Rambus market share which appear to conclusively show that it will be the dominant technology. According to Mohammad Iqbal, director of worldwide strategic marketing of memories, in 1999 Rambus is likely to have 1.6 per cent market share, with PC-133 scoring 7.7 per cent. That situation will shift dramatically in the year 2000, with PC-133 lording it with 22.1 per cent of the market, Rambus nine per cent, and DDR only three per cent. However, Iqbal said that Mosel Vitelic would support Direct Rambus if it became successful. The problems militating against the techology are threefold, Iqbal said. The first problem was the pricing structure, the second was technical and the third was that Direct Rambus was a new technology and therefore had no evolutionary history. One of the technical problems was something called "cache trashing", said Iqbal. Because clock speeds on Direct Rambus are so high, that meant that application data swamped cache. As a result, PC companies including HP, had asked Rambus to look at its technology again. Because of this problem, the first RIMMs to ship will run at 356MHz rather than the 800MHz that was promised. Iqbal said that PC customers, overwhelmingly, had voted with their feet and wanted to adopt the PC-133 standard. He was not willing to comment on Intel's position on PC-133. But, by now, you'd have thought Intel would have wanted to comment on its own position, particularly so if its customers, the PC companies, feel the way Iqbal described. ®