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TAIPEI, TAIWAN -- Intel bowed to the demands of PC buyers and vendors Monday when it unveiled its new 845 Pentium 4 chip set, which will work with SDRAM and DDR instead of the more expensive RDRAM.

The company introduced the new chip set, and displayed more than 63 PC motherboards built around it, at the Computex trade show here Monday. Intel expects to ship the new chip set this September, says Timothy Change, a senior field sales engineer at Intel.

The motherboards on display Monday use the first version of the 845, which supports only SDRAM. A second version that will support both SDRAM and DDR should become available in the first quarter of 2002, says William Siu, vice president and general manager of Intel's Desktop Platforms Group. Siu demonstrated the SDRAM-only chip set during his keynote Monday.

Intel: 845 No Rambus Dis

Until now, Intel, a staunch supporter of Rambus's proprietary memory interface, has offered only its RDRAM-based 850 chip set for use with the Pentium 4. That chip set doesn't let PC makers use cheaper SDRAM or DDR-DRAM memory chips and has caused controversy in the PC industry because of the higher price of chips based on the Rambus technology.

Intel introduced the 845 to give system vendors a choice of memory technologies, Siu says. RDRAM remains the best technology for most high-performance systems.

"We believe that the people who demand the maximum performance from the Pentium 4 processor platforms will continue to favor RDRAM solutions," he says.

However, Intel realizes that not everyone wants to pay for Rambus performance, and the 845 will serve these users best, he says. "We're providing the customer with a choice depending on the level of memory performance they desire. We think that the consumer choice will ultimately set the dynamics of memory usage for the new platforms," Siu says.

Siu is quick to note that Intel sees the price difference between RDRAM and its alternatives continuing to narrow.

Smaller, Cheaper Systems

In addition to the likely lower prices of machines based on the new chip set (thanks to the cheaper memory they will use), systems may also be physically smaller. The 845 features a smaller "thermal," the casing around the processor CPU that holds the heat sink. The smaller casing will allow for smaller systems, Change says. Intel may later introduce another chip set with the smaller thermal to support Rambus.

Also at the showcase, Intel demonstrated working prototypes of small-form-factor consumer PCs based on the Pentium 4, including two that feature the upcoming 2-GHz Pentium 4 processor. The 2-GHz chip is set to ship in mid-August, according to David Wang, an Intel technical support engineer. Each uses the Intel 850 chip set.

The new PCs have limited expansion capabilities but are designed to sell at a price attractive to consumers, most likely below $1000, Wang says. Designers achieved the small size of the systems by putting power-supply components in an enlarged adapter on the power cord.

Although the systems lack internal expansion ports, users will be able to add capabilities to them through multiple USB interfaces. PCs like the concepts shown could appear in the United States and Japan in about seven months, Wang says.

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