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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Dan3 who wrote (67244)8/1/1999 7:23:00 PM
From: grok  Read Replies (2) of 1574001
 
RE: <A server using 4 way interleaved DDRSDRAM 266 will have a significant advantage over one using DRDRAM...>

People designing in drdram in a large server would use many multiple rambus channels. For example, the 21364 Alpha chip supports 4 rambus channels on each processor and, I think, they plan on at least 64 processors so you'd have 256 channels and massive bandwidth and latency will be low since the channels attach right to the processors with no chip set in the way.

I don't know if this architecture will dominate since it is a Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architecture and has sw issues. But other architecures are also easily supported with multiple channels due to the low pin count of the drdram channel.

The biggest problems that rambus has in highend servers comes from RAS (Reliability and Serviceability) issues. For example I don't see how you can do pair matching with drdram since you can't mess with loads. Also, I heard it said that with drdram ecc you can't implement the "chip kill" feature of operating even if an entire dram dies. I don't know if either of these issues are fundamentally unsolveable problems for rambus but I know that certain server designers are ruling it out for today's designs.
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