Radeon9500 the only mainstream DX9 card available this year?

[martrox]

The fact the there will be no DDr II dimms available, due to no JEDEC standards, has absolutely nothing to do with videocards, as they only use the raw chips with their own controllers..... I'm fairly certain that both nVidia & ATI already have their hands on said chips...... Samsung said they had already produced DDr II chips in May, and Micron said same in July.....

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2118972,00.html

 

[RussSchultz]

I'm with Pete. Selling the R300 chip at a reduced speed, or purposefully disabling portions of the chip, or coupling it with 128 bit bus in a cheaper package may be what's powering the 9500 & PRO, but culling the yield reject bin for part that have specific defects seems unlikely.

 

[Sabastian]

I hope you didn't read that news as "DDR-II is not expected to be on the market this year".

Thanks for pointing that out. It seems I misread the article.

re: "Graphics card makers were pushing for a fast track adoption by the end of the year of the DDR-II specification tailored to their specific needs. However the JEDEC sources believed this was overly ambitious and any DDR-II graphics version won't be finalized until early next year."

At any rate it does seem as though ATi is looking for a DDR-II solution as well. While not that this is a surprise it solidifies that ATi will have a response (I believe.) to the NV30... That should be interesting. BTW I apologize for misinterpreting that piece and commenting as if DDR-II would not be available.

 

[Raystream]

Hmm

I found this a couple of weeks ago

Micron ships quad memory, DDR-II SRAM

And DDR 333 starts a-ramping

MEMORY GIANT Micron said it has started shipping production 18MB QDR II (quad data rate) and DDR-II SRAM memories.
The firm claims that these products are the first qualified production volumes and they're aimed at the switch and router market.

The 18MB devices run at 333MHz and provide what Micron calls a data valid window of 65% of the clock cycle.

Meanwhile, reports said that Nanya and Samsung have largely switched production away from DDR 266 modules to the newer 333 type of memory.

DDR 400 is not yet validated and is, to the best of our knowledge, awaiting verification by the industry standard committee, Jedec. µ