Rambus offers to quadruple DRAM data access speeds

[Carrie]

The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/04/rambus_micro-threading/)
By Tony Smith
Published Monday 4th April 2005

Rambus has developed a memory technology it claims will yield as much as a fourfold performance gain over standard memory yet can be applied to today's DRAM core designs.

The technique, dubbed 'Micro-threading', involves partitioning the memory chip's storage into separate addressable areas, to which data requests can be sent in parallel, allowing the memory controller to send, say, four data requests in the time it would previously have taken it to send just one.

Full story (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/04/rambus_micro-threading/)

[infringer]

It's not a linear improvement. Rambus' numbers suggest that while the best cases might bring back data four times as fast as before, depending on the application, you might only get a doubling of performance. How well the host memory controller, be it on a computer motherboard or on a graphics card can take advantage of the gain is another matter. The performance gain may easily be countered by bandwidth limitations elsewhere in the system.

Bottlenecks are currently a problem...

Rambus Memory is extremely pricey in comparison to its DDR Counterparts.

Rambus also is not suported by as many chipsets as DDR.... If you look at rambus of the past you will find that rambus did not go over very well I dont recall all the technical reasons but there were hardware reasons why it did not go over very well and I am sure the price of the chips did not help much either.

I'm interested to see though how this round of rambus will hold in the market. And also interested to see its results on the preformance level.

-infringer-