[citation][nom]TA152H[/nom] !RDRAM failed, not because of RDRAM, but because of the Pentium III. Which brings us to the Willamette too. The Williamette reached 2 GHz on the same process technology that the Pentium III/Coppermine reached 1.1 GHz, and outperformed it EASILY at virtually everything at that clock speed, and even when introduced at 1.5 GHz (compared to 1 GHz Pentium III) beat it in virtually all benchmarks. [/citation]
Er... no. RD-RAM failed because they screwed everyone. Intel had their hand in RD-RAM and pushed it down everyones throats. It caused production problems for SDR & DDR memory which resulted in overall price increases, but still far cheaper than RD-RAM.
The overall performance difference between RD-RAM and DDR was minimal for the earlier P4s. DDR2 only got faster as RD-RAM faded away. May RAMBUS die painfully.
And NO #2. The first P4s were SLOWER than P3s. Intel promoted the P4 as "they will get faster as clock rates ramp up" - the Netburst design was made for high clock-rates, not performance. Hence, unless the P4/Netburst was doing a single hard job - such as rendering or encoding video/audio (and nothing else) it was a Piece of sh** CPU that sold for very high prices. A buddy way back then had a P4 1.4 or 1.6Ghz, it was easily on par with my P3-900Mhz. And AMD beat the P4 up and down the street. Even in the later days of crapburst, a $250 AMD at 2.2Ghz was better for general/gaming than the $1000 P4 3.6~3.8Ghz Extreme Edition CPUs. Then lately, AMD took a page out of Intel and did netburst 2.0 on their latest CPUs... which is why many AMDers have jumped to Intel.
Then intel shoved RD-RAM into their P3 line, which was stupid since it offered NO performance improvement, so they tacked on the MTB onto the crappy 810 boards - which were unstable and performed slower than the BX-boards it was supposed to replace. Hence, VIA grew quickly to fill the void as intel was busy with law-suits and recalls until the i815 boards came out - the last great P3 board. RD-RAM offered nothing that DDR couldn't handle at 1/4 the price. At one of my offices, we still have a 2.4Ghz P4 Dell with RD-RAM I can't wait to toss. Its the slowest POS in the office.
Cyrix: actually made some good CPUs. They took care of the bottom-end market. Their 486DX chips were quite good. I sold hundreds of them in our little PC shop. Never had one fail / return. The Cyrix DX/4 100 could easily OC past the intel/AMD and were SUPER cool... ie: an intel would burn your finger, while the cyrix was barely warm. not bad. But Cyrix could NOT make anything to compete against the Pentiums and rightfully died. Man, they made various junk hybrid thingies.