Paul, and ALL, interesting article. Intel and Rambus bring us nDRam..
Memory of the Future
Intel and Rambus team up on high-speed memory design.
(1/22/97) -- PC system and processor designers have known for some time that existing memory architectures will in short order be too slow to keep up with microprocessor speeds. Now that Intel has made a deal to license memory designs from Rambus a developer of a super-high-speed memory interface technology, Intel has effectively anointed Rambus technology as the main memory architecture of the future. Together, Intel and Rambus plan to design the next generation of Rambus dynamic memory, called nDRAM, which could reach 1.6 gigabyte per second by 1999.
SDRAM, the current performance leader among main memory architectures, is expected to run into serious technical hurdles as system-bus speeds surpass 100 MHz in the next couple of years. Today, Rambus ships RDRAM at 600 MHz and plans to deliver speed increases on a semi-regular basis.
Big Breaks
Founded in 1990, Rambus has received praise from the technical community for its 600-megabytes-per-second DRAM interface, RDRAM, which is designed to run ten times as fast as conventional DRAM interfaces. But the company has won few actual contracts for the product. Last year, Rambus had its first big break with Nintendo 64, the RISC-based game machine, which during last year's holiday shopping season posted sales second only to Tickle Me Elmo.
RDRAM has always had industry-leading memory bandwidth and has made great strides to minimize the one weakness in the architecture--high latency prior to the initial transfer of data. Intel and Rambus are now shooting for 1.6GBps nDRAM. According to industry newsletter Microprocessor Report, Intel's upcoming P7 processor, code-named Merced, has a voracious appetite for memory, and Intel needs to keep the rest of the system moving fast enough to make Merced look good. Intel expects Merced to be ready in about a year and expects nDRAM to be the mainstream memory architecture by 1999.
The only potential competitor to RDRAM is SyncLink DRAM, a specification that semiconductor companies are currently hammering out. Intel's endorsement of RDRAM appears to doom SyncLink--at least as a high-volume main memory architecture.--Larry Seltzer
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Paul, I've never heard of this before. nDRam? What do you think this will do to companies like Alliance and Integrated Device?
Regards, Michael |
