Regarding Willy, Rambus, and Performance/Cost issues...
So, Paul, I read your post about Willy being initially tied to RDRAM, and your claim that this is fine, despite the memory expense, because it will be sold into high performance markets where cost is not an issue.
Question: Isn't most of that high-performance market made up of servers with large memory requirements? (Say 1-4 Gb) I'd guess the answer is yes. And isn't the problem with RDRAM the fact that the modules sit in series, not in parallel, so that latency increases with additional modules? I'd thought that was the reason that even INTC was planning on DDR memory for servers (read: any machine with large RAM requirements). So, what market does that leave? I suppose there's a small market in scientific applications with low RAM requirements (but CPU-hungry algorithms), and sure, there are a few consumers out there for which cost is no object, but in general, the tying to RDRAM seems like an initial handicap, unless prices collapse by Willy's release date... (what's the latest on that? Q4 limited, Q1 volume? )
Doug |
