Rambus Memory

[peat moss]

Trying to make a come back? Didn't seem very popular , and ca n't remember why, price?



http://netscape.com.com/2110-9584_22-5549825.html

[lynx]

It has to have a very limited memory bus width, simply to get the synchronisation at the high speeds involved.

As I understand it, that's fine if you only want a small amount of memory, but as you add more chips they all have to share the bus so the high speeds are wasted.

Samsung plans to introduce a 512mb XDR DRAM chip capable of transferring data as fast as 12.8 gigabytes per second during the first half of this year.

That's a 64MB chip, not that great with only an 8 bit bus, and the rest of the chips queueing up waiting to transmit data, so the data rate is not sustainable. However, serial transmission used by PCIe may make a big difference to that scenario.

[zeustke165]

Rambus offers very high memory bandwidth, The memory bus may only be 64 bits, but they must be used in pairs, thus providing the standard 128 bits, just like DDR, the biggest fraw back was latency, It was up to twice as high as DDR, thus the processor does a lot of waiting for Rambus to start sending data, so the over all effect was DDR edged out rambus performance wise. I did hear it was making a comeback, can't remember exactly which procesor, but it wil work exclusively with rambus memory, kinda like the P$ when it first came out, I think it might be the cell processor...