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Caminogate III: i820 Rambus problem still a mystery

Engineers fail to find root cause of problem

Despite an intensive search to find out why the Camino i820 chipset does not work with three Rambus RIMMs, engineers have still no real idea what the problem is, although Intel claims the problem is not in the chipset. That means that there is no absolute guarantee that the i820 chipset will work with two RIMMs, according to sources close to Intel, although the two RIMM version has been exhaustively tested. An engineer told The Register that designers have failed to find the root cause of the problem, although motherboards using the i820 with two rather than three RIMMs does seem to work. The three RIMM design with the i820 chipset caused signal errors and engineers at both Rambus and Intel have still not pinned down exactly what the problem is. Since the company withdrew the i820 chipset, engineers have tested a large number of two RIMM i820 designs and so far have not detected any problems with these designs. The basic re-designed design has not been re-worked, although no doubt Intel is still trying to get to the bottom of the problem. An Intel representative said that the additional RIMM on the three board i820 gave no additional memory support over and above 512Mb, but was designed to add flexibility so that smaller memory modules could be added to systems. He said: "We did do a root cause analysis. The problem wasn't in the chipset so we targeted the two RIMM motherboard as a working solution. You can still get the same memory size of 512Mb as in the three RIMM version." ®

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