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Second-Gen DDR SDRAM On The Horizon
cplcap writes "This story in The Register picks up on Samsung's new DDR-II Chips, pushing DDR's speed up to 533 Mb/s and a 4.2GB/s memory bus. Prototype 512MB DIMMs are being produced, and IBM has developed a chipset to take advantage of the speed. There's a little more meat in Samsung's official press release."
something tells me that the "computer age" is getting a bit unbalanced... we're nowhere NEAR reaching the hardware limits that we already have (home useage speaking at least) and we're already surpassing whats more than enough? sounds a bit unneccesary, at least for the moment...
The article says that IBM made a chipset to take advantage the new memory speed, but what CPU does the chipset support? Athlon? P4? G4/G5? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Frye?
"I'm The Bounty Bear. I will find him anywhere. I'm searching."
Have you not seen the new intel servers IBM is releasing like the x360 and x440?
Need more PCI? Add a drawer of 12 and plug in a cable. Need more processors? Buy another four way and plug them together, you have an eight way.
Hot swap a failed memory dimm lately? You can in a x440.
There are a lot of cool tech coming from IBM in the xSeries servers. There are only so many marketing guys out there
But it sure is easy to bash IBM, so people do. They are changing. You think the layoffs of the last year or two are getting rid of the good people and not the middle management?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I suspect that there were really two factors at work in the short DDR-I lifetime.
First, Intel muddied the waters with the big exclusive Rambus push. While there was DDR work going on prior to the Rambus push, there was some very real contention in carrying both programs through development. This doesn't even mention quite a bit of "wait and back the winner," at many levels of the industry.I suspect that the success of the Athlon competing with PIII had almost as much to do with DDR success as Rambus prices.
Second, there were very real signal integrity issues that had been skirted for quite some time, and really came to the fore with DDR. That took some time, but more thought has been applied forward to DDR-II, so it shouldn't be as painful.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
210GHz is the unity gain bandwidth of that transistor. That means that when switching at 210GHz, it only puts out as much as you put in (in layman's terms). In terms of chip production, that means you can only have a fanout of one. Therefore, it's impossible to construct basic circuit elements at that speed. Once you throw in a requirement for a fanout of say, 10, you've thrown 10 gate capacitances in parallel with that transistor, which is going to knock its bandwidth down quite a bit. To what, I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was by at least an order of magnitude.