Acer Labs licensed to make Pentium 4 chip sets

In an interview with EE Times, Acer Labs president Chin Wu said, "It is our own choice as to what we want to do" regarding the Pentium 4 chip set's memory support, and he declined to say whether Intel pushed for the chip set to support Direct Rambus DRAM rather than double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM. Wu would not talk about the details of the licensing agreement, but said, "there were fewer restrictions than in the past.."

Wu said he expects Intel will also license both of Acer Labs' major competitors, Via Technologies and Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS). Both are still in negotiations with the chip giant. Intel seemed open to partners that could help enable a quick ramp-up for the Pentium 4 this year, he said. "Intel won't treat the significant players in the market very differently," he said. "If we got it [the license], then Via and SiS will get it soon."

Via has indicated that it could have a Pentium 4 chip set with a DDR memory solution ready in the second quarter. That would be timed well to take advantage of Intel's second-half release of the mainstream PC Pentium 4, code-named Northwood, which will work with a single-data-rate SDRAM or DDR SDRAM memory solution.

Intel has scheduled the release of its single-data-rate Brookdale chip set for the third quarter, but industry sources have said that the company may try to pull in the release of its DDR version of the Brookdale to the third quarter as well. "The demand for a Brookdale that only talks to single-data-rate SDRAM is going to be low because DDR is going to be whomping the market at that time, because everyone wants speed and you should have price parity by then [between SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM]," said Paul Meyer, an analyst with Credit Lyonnais in Taipei.

That could cause further problems between Intel and Rambus Inc., which reportedly have a contract that restricts Intel from supporting other memory solutions for the Pentium 4 until 2003. "You could take their decision to license these guys [this soon] as a signal that they aren't going to push out a DDR Brookdale in the third quarter to avoid legal issues with Rambus," Meyer said. "In the end, how important is this core logic business to Intel? It's beans."

But getting third-party chip set support for the Pentium 4, even if it is with a DDR memory solution, will help Intel battle Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which is exploiting Intel's legal obligation to Rambus to gain market share with its high-end Athlon processors. The company will start shipments this quarter of DDR chip sets that it says improve the performance of its 1.2-GHz Athlon by 15 percent to 20 percent over similar processors using chip sets with a PC-133 interface.