800 MHz RAM?

Anyone know if the T61 or T61p will take 800 MHz RAM, if not, anyone want to hazard a guess as to when 800 MHz RAM will become available for the T61's

Seems that most laptops have been using 667 MHz RAM for a while now.

 

DDR2 800MHz RAM is not currently supported by the Santa Rosa chipset used by both the T61 and the T61p.

 

I don't understand why the Santa Rosa chipset won't support 800 MHz RAM when the FSB of the CPU is 800MHz!!!!

 

Those two FSB speeds are not directly comparable. The CPU FSB is quad-clocked, which means in actuality it's speed is 200MHz. The memory speeds is dual clocked (hence the Doube Data Rate in DDR), so it's actual speed is 333MHz. Thus even DDR2 667 memory is still running "faster" than the CPU FSB, so it's not necessary to provide support for higher clocked memory.

 

800mhz RAM throttles down to 667mhz when installed on Santa Rosa. It might be possible that a BIOS or something could run the RAM at 800mhz. I'm not sure about that. Most people believe that Santa Rosa will never run at 800mhz and that won't be an option until the next chipset. Also, the belief that the FSB and the RAM Mhz need to match isn't really true. There is still a small increase in performance having 800Mhz FSB and 667 Mhz RAM. The performance benefit of having 800 Mhz FSB and 800 Mhz RAM will be just another tiny performance increase.

 

not only the thinkpad, every laptops now with Santa Rosa platform don't support 800Hrz ram..

We have to wait to see if the Extreme X6800 does, or the next generation of processors