If I Made Mobos . . .

Willy/SDR boards can only be a triumph of mind going under to marketing. There is no sane reason to want this, except . . . .

Most, if not all these boards are supposed to be DDR-ready, but won’t be DDR until the Intel Fairy Godmother gets out of the clutches of the Evil Rambus and waves her wand sometime in 2002.

Hmmm. If I were a mobo manufacturer . . .

• I sure wouldn’t want to redesign the board again, so I’d design it so it could accommodate either SDR or DDR memory slots.
• Wait a minute, people are now pushing 184-pin SDR memory modules that will fit into DDR memory slots and run either. How convenient.
• I sure wouldn’t want to prevent anybody from buying a motherboard now, and shifting to DDR later, would you? Sounds like a pretty good marketing point to me.
• If I want to get an extra edge, and I build a mobo that can go to DDR at the change of a switch or a setting, I might not protect that secret of enabling DDR too hard. Nothing official, of course. “Leaks happen, Mr. Intel. We’re sorry. We’ll look into it and get back to you someday. We knew you’d understand. :)”

• Or if I’m Mr. Intel, maybe I put up really detailed and informative data sheets, and just call the DDR enabling setting in BIOS “Reserved.” Nobody will ever figure that out, Mr. Rambus.

If only I made mobos. . . .

Email Ed