MaximumPC 2006 10

reviews TESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED

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58 MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCCOCTOBER 2006

RDRAM

Remember how Intel tried to RAM it down our throats?

In 1999, a company named Rambus attempted to shake up the

sleepy, commoditized RAM world with a new type of memory:

Rambus DRAM, or RDRAM for short.

Somehow, Intel bought into the idea that RDRAM’s radical

architecture, which required a special motherboard and heat-

sink-equipped RAM sticks called RIMMs, would be preferable

to consumers, who were still using easy-to-obtain SDRAM. Oh,

and one more thing: RDRAM was ungodly expensive. It was

typically two to four times the price of SDRAM, then the indus-

try standard.

Two things made the situation untenable: RDRAM’s per-

formance boost hardly merited its extreme cost premium,

and the Rambus legal crew started getting pushy, eventually

claiming Rambus owned the patent to not only RDRAM but

also SDRAM. A glut of lawsuits ensued (including an antitrust

charge against Rambus), and Intel was forced to drop the tech-

nology in favor of the peoples’ choice—SDRAM. This was the

nail in RDRAM’s coffi n.

Tech Tragedies

A Tragedy in the Making: HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray

Enough problems to make you yearn for Betamax

Intel i820 Chipset

A tale of two RAM types

And while we’re talking about

RDRAM.... Intel was so hot on the

stuff that in 2000 it quickly com-

missioned a motherboard to take

advantage of this great little memory

technology. When consumers balked

at RDRAM prices, Intel came up with

a solution that would work for RDRAM

and SDRAM alike—or so it thought:

the Memory Translator Hub (MTH),

which would let RDRAM mother-

boards work with SDRAM memory.

Well, it simply didn’t work, and

MTH-equipped i820 (code-name

“Camino”) mobos were so slow and

crash-prone that Intel ultimately gave

up, recalling every MTH system it had

sold—close to a million buggy boards

at a price of half a billion dollars.

Hilariously, the problem turned out to

be fi xable by adding a single resistor

to the MTH. Most consumers not only

got new motherboards, they also got

free RDRAM as well. The disaster was

eventually dubbed “Caminogate.”

try standard.

Two things made the situation untenable: RDRAM’s per-

formance boost hardly merited its extreme cost premium,

and the Rambus legal crew started getting pushy, eventually

claiming Rambus owned the patent to not only RDRAM but

also SDRAM. A glut of lawsuits ensued (including an antitrust

charge against Rambus), and Intel was forced to drop the tech-

nology in favor of the peoples’ choice—SDRAM. This was the

A Tragedy in the Making: HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray

MTH-equipped i820 (code-name

“Camino”) mobos were so slow and

crash-prone that Intel ultimately gave

up, recalling every MTH system it had

sold—close to a million buggy boards

at a price of half a billion dollars.

Hilariously, the problem turned out to

be fi xable by adding a single resistor

to the MTH. Most consumers not only

got new motherboards, they also got

free RDRAM as well. The disaster was

eventually dubbed “Caminogate.”

nology in favor of the peoples’ choice—SDRAM. This was the

nail in RDRAM’s coffi n.

up, recalling every MTH system it had

sold—close to a million buggy boards

at a price of half a billion dollars.

Hilariously, the problem turned out to

be fi xable by adding a single resistor

to the MTH. Most consumers not only

got new motherboards, they also got

free RDRAM as well. The disaster was

eventually dubbed “Caminogate.”

Don’t look now, but high-tech disasters

have hardly gone away. In fact, there’s

one in our midst as you read this, and it

will have a devastating impact on many

people, including you, me, and every

other lover of high-def content.

The technology is next-gen optical,

and its development has been plagued

by bickering, delays, and a bloody format

war that saw both parties walk away from

the bargaining table. But while the world

has been focused on the feud between

the two competing standards (Blu-ray

and HD-DVD), less has been written

about the fundamental fl aws of both

technologies. Fortunately, the facts are

now creeping out.

Big problem #1: Does your TV have

an HDMI port or DVI port that supports

the HDCP encryption standard? You’ll

defi nitely want the encumbering tech if

you buy into a next-gen optical format.

If you connect a high-def player using

any analog technology, your movies can

be arbitrarily down-converted to 580p,

nearly the same resolution you get with

a regular DVD disc. Why? The usual

reason: Studios are scared you’ll make a

perfect copy of Crossroads and distribute

it on BitTorrent. Same goes for the digital

connection between your videocard and

monitor; if you want to play content on

your PC—both components must be

HDCP-compliant or your movies simply

won’t play. Your only playback option is

to use the craptacular down-convert-

ing analog connection. For more on this

issue see In the Lab on page 76.

Big problem #2: Worse than the ill-

conceived content protection schemes

is the kill switch built into all Blu-ray and

HD-DVD players. If miscreants or infor-

mation pirates fi nd an exploit in a particu-

lar model of hardware that allows them to

illicitly copy content or bypass the DRM

schemes, future software simply won’t

work on any of that model player until

the fi rmware has been updated. Say your

hardware vendor went out of business:

Your only recourse is to buy a new player,

at least if you want to watch new discs.

For more on strangling a technology

before it gets to market, see DVD-Audio

and SACD.

free RDRAM as well. The disaster was