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Mamba: Athlon And DRAM Get Together

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fact-or-fiction-or-just-plain-cool dept.

scottnews writes: "Tom's Hardware has posted this story about a new chipset for the AMD Athlon processor with 8MB of embedded DRAM in the chipset for 9.6 GB/s of sustainable bandwidth." Thatsa spicy meatball.

3 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. This all sounds cool on paper, but.... by Mr.+Neutron · · Score: 4
    Has Micron made a PC chipset before? While they may be great at designing DRAM, and even logic, it is very difficult to produce a stable chipset. Look at the history of VIA and SiS. Lack of chipset stability is one of the main drawbacks to the Athlon. If Micron goes forth with this venture, expect it to be a while before they can get the chipset to an acceptable level of reliability.

    I hope they do well, and I hope this come to realization. I also hope that VIA and AMD can produce better chipsets (like the AMD760), so that there are no more drawbacks to using a great CPU.

    --
    "How many six year olds does it take to design software?"

    --
    dinner: it's what's for beer
  2. Oops. by plastickiwi · · Score: 5
    The article reads in part:
    In designing the Samurai, Micron noticed that 40% of its die was unused white space.

    Heh. They "noticed" that 40% of the die space was unused?

    ENGINEER BOB: Hey Steve, I just noticed that we're only using 60% of the die space on the Samurai.
    ENGINEER STEVE: Hmm.... Damned if you're not right! How did that slip past us in the months we spent designing it? Good thing you're on the job, Bob!

    --
    -- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
  3. Re:Good For AMD by evanbd · · Score: 4
    Ummm.... read the article...

    This isn't about that at all. This is Micron's new chipset, Mamba. It is the successor to Samaurai, their DDR reference chipset. When they built Samaurai, they found they had not used 40% of the die space, so they added an 8MB DRAM cache to it. The cache is 50% lower latency, with a 9.6GB/s bandwidth; it is completely different from the 760MP buffer, which is strictly a BUFFER not a cache, and only allows some reordering to improve performance.