Where's Alviso? - So, Did Intel Learn Anything from That?
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The question still remains: why are we not able to purchase laptops making full use of the Sonoma platform? Intel has not given an official reason for this. Typical procedure from Chipzilla is to deny (already occurred), give an official push back to the release date, and then finally come out with the product in limited supply. Of course, there’d still be no reason given for the change in plans, with nothing more than guess work and unofficial reports to get all this information.
At this time, everything in reports has pointed towards the silicon not being up to Intel's strict production standards. This makes sense, as there were also issues with the launch (and subsequent recall) of the desktop i915/925 chipsets, and the mobile platform shares quite a bit with both of those platforms as mentioned above. It's not a stretch to believe that they even share an identical South Bridge, which might have been where the problem originated. Again, Intel doesn't make official statements regarding what they do and why, so we can't be sure.
Something I question is the availability of DDR2 in quantity that can be used for a launch. Memory used in laptops is of a different form factor than that used in desktops, since it obviously has a smaller space to fit into. There is not currently much in the way of desktop DDR2 meant for average consumers (enthusiasts are another story), which means that there’s a chance that there won’t be many manufacturers getting on their horse to provide it in another form factor. Considering the absolutely outrageous costs associated with DDR2 at the moment, do any of Intel's vendors even want to touch that to begin with?
This is a fairly similar situation to one a few years back when Intel released a desktop chipset named Camino (i820). It sported a new type of memory at the time, RAMBUS/RDRAM. RDRAM was horrendously expensive, and provided no clear performance boost to the Pentium III over other options such as the i815 (which arrived later due to market demand), or the ancient 440BX which were both based on SDRAM.
So, did Intel learn something from that?
Silicon is supposed to be shipping in late Q4. Typically, it takes 6 weeks after that for products to show up in retail making use of that technology. So, somewhere around January/February, assuming we don't see another push back we'll know some more answers as to why Alviso has been MIA. Considering the leap that Intel is attempting to make with this platform, I look forward to seeing the results.
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