Elmer, right now, Intel designs and ramps their CPUs to their own schedule. Their chipsets, on the other hand, follow the memory industry. Given the ramp and health of DDR400 memory, Intel was able to improve the Springdale and Canterwood chipsets to support this. If Intel had a controller integrated onto Northwood, they would not be able to take advantage of DDR400 without changing the CPU. Then they would have to align that in all their factories, which is a big deal with Intel's volumes.
By comparison, DDR400 was a small hop, and ultimately a frequency boost over DDR333. DDR2 standards, on the other hand, require quite a bit of change. Look at the potential problem that AMD faces. If they fail to adopt DDR2, and the memory standard takes off, then AMD is left behind. On the other hand, if they support DDR2 and the memory industry is late, then they have a CPU with no memory to attach. They have no choice but to support DDR and DDR2 standards, even though this comes at the expense of more complex logic, more validation, and more design time.
Intel, on the other hand, can ship their CPUs independently of the memory industry and ramp their fabs accordingly. It will be their next generation chipsets that will support the memory standards, and their shorter design cycle means that supporting last minute standards is not something that will hold up the rest of the company. For example, Intel's roadmaps (as rumored on various websites), show Grantsdale as a DDR2 chipset in 2004 for Prescott. Since Prescott will already work on the Springdale chipset, it will not hold up sales if Intel needs to delay Grantsdale to support changes in the memory controller. Those changes might be anything from supporting a new standard that wasn't anticipated as being ready on time, or supporting an old standard to make up for slow progress on future standards. The flexibility is there, and for a high volume company like Intel, they need the flexibility.
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