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Rambus Takes Another Shot At High-End Memory

Posted by timothy on from the memory-belongs-in-heads dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware is running an article about Extreme Data Rate memory (XDR DRAM for short), which was developed by Rambus and now entered mass production in Samsung's fabs. Right now, Rambus says the memory is only for high-bandwidth multimedia applications such as Sony's Cell processor, but the company ultimately hopes to push XDR into PCs and graphics cards by 2006. Time will tell if Rambus has learned from the mistakes it made with RDRAM a few years ago."

3 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why do we use DRAM in this day and age? by tomstdenis · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...SRAM is much more expensive to produce? It also takes more power and generates more heat.

    That and the benefits of cache go DOWN as the size of the cache goes up. Past a MB or two the benefits would be lowered. Also as the # of address lines goes up the access gets slower. And finally a bigger bottle neck is that "external memory" is external.

    So unless you want to pay for a cpu with a GB of onboard "memory" in the form of SRAM.... the benefits won't be that high.

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  2. Re:latency? by be-fan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not necessarily. It depends on the application. In "streaming" applications (hint: 3D rendering like on a graphics card!) the latency doesn't matter nearly as much as bandwidth.

    --
    A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  3. Time Will Tell? by cacepi · · Score: 5, Informative

    Time will tell if Rambus has learned from the mistakes it made with RDRAM a few years ago.

    Well, Rambus has expanded their latest lawsuit blitz to include DDR2 patent claims, so do you think they've learned?