Are the bigshots abandoning DDR?

When we wrote about our Athlon DDR system a fortnight ago, we told you that the only thing that stood in the way of a whole-hearted recommendation of the Athlon DDR platform was stability. That was then, this is now, and our system has worked flawlessly the whole time. Not one embarrassing problem, not one niggling crash, perfect. In fact, the one and only thing that remains a source of mild perturbation is the lack of a multiplier changing facility on our ASUS board.

The other thing we mentioned though, was that despite the price drops, the performance gain was at best slight, and the usual upgrade-friendly overclocking crowd might take issue with that.

It looks like we were right, because if rumours circulating at OCWorkBench are correct, Taiwanese manufacturers including Gigabyte, ASUS, Microstar and others may pull out of DDR motherboard production completely. With Pentium 4 prices dropping left, right and centre, the writer at OCWB points out that P4 and DDR are moving in opposite directions, and manufacturers are unhappy with the stability of the DDR market.

To compound this fact, the fabled coupling of Pentium III with DDR proved entirely useless, with an even feebler performance improvement than with Athlon. The chips simply don't know what to do with all that bandwidth.

Digitimes echoes the story, claiming that the R&D departments of the major motherboard manufacturers named above have already stopped toiling over DDR platforms.

With this in mind, any would-be bailers are welcome to ship their DDR memory to the usual address. We've got a working system that could do with it...