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An Overview of Quad Band Memory
tedgyz writes "AnandTech has a short article on a new memory technology from Via, called Quad Band Memory (QBM). Rather than using dual-channel DDR to increase bandwidth, they use phase-shifting inside the memory modules to accomplish the same goal. The end result is simpler (and presumably cheaper) motherboard designs that are backwards compatible with current DDR modules. The downside? It is currently only going to available in a P4 chipset that Intel has not authorized."
Given the memory manufacturers' resistance to DDR400 and the achingly slow progress that DDR2 is taking (the module standard isn't even final yet), this technology has a pretty good potential to reach production.
-h-
The downside? It is currently only going to available in a P4 chipset that Intel has not authorized."
Why is this a downside? Why should I give a rat's ass what Intel "authorizes".
Intel sure as hell didn't authorize my Athlon on it's Abit mobo with a Via chipset.
Is there an actual downside to not getting Intel's blessing (downside for consumers, not the company making the mobo)?
Um, disk isn't a bottleneck on my system. I do lots of C++ programming, and everything gets cached in RAM after the first build. Thus, my bottleneck becomes gcc ...err... CPU and memory bandwidth :) Same thing when I'm doing 3D rendering (which had better fit in RAM or else) or playing 3D games and whatnot. I thought moving to a 4200 RPM laptop hard drive was going to be bad, after my nice 7200 RPM IDE RAID. In truth, thanks to the Linux VM, I don't notice the difference after the first half hour of using the system. However, I did notice the big boost that came with moving from a PC100 memory system to a PC266, even just palying around with GUI wigets (resizing and whatnot).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I always love morons who criticize things when they aren't part of their intended audience. Unless you're a gamer, you have no reason to be at those sites. If you are, those sites are invaluable. Quick, what's faster, the Radeon 8500 or the GeForce4 MX? I don't really care, my gaming is limited to some RPGs and the occasional CounterStrike match. However when I wanted to buy my brother a new graphics card, you bet he was happy that I did my research at those sites first. I used to frequent those sites a lot, back when I did a lot of 3D programming and gaming. I honestly needed the performance, and those sights provided a lot of good guidence, as well as useful ways to get cheap hardware to do cool things (overclocking Celeron 300A's and running them in SMP for example, or joining the bridges on Athlon XPs to get them running in SMP). As for the bit about advertisers, that's bull. The internet keeps these sites honest. A GeForce 4 TI 4600 really is a lot faster than a Radeon 8500. If a site says otherwise because of advertising, a second opinion (or third or fourth) is just a click away. In the future, it would be wise to provide specific proof before criticizing people of lacking journalistic integrity.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
For example, the expected soft-fail rate of a computer memory system in Denver, Colorado is about 4 times greater than the rate expected at a city it sea level (such as New York City). Even in Leadville, Colorado (which is located at 10,151 feet) the expected failure rate is only about 13 times greater than in NYC. No location in Colorado even approaches 100x.
For more information, see the following paper:It can be found online here.