Re: surely you do not plan to leave us with that
Ok, here - once again :-) is why I am skeptical of Rambus.
- Rambus 300/600 had 2 advantages over PC100: better bandwidth and much better streaming, in latency it was worse than PC100.
- Rambus 400/800 improves bandwidth and streaming by 33%, but latency improvement is less
In the last 6 months, VC DRAM and DDR DRAM have begun entering production, with a cost increase much smaller than rambus, and performance improvements of up to 260% (for DDR 266 burst and streaming) latency improvement is similar to rambus.
Rambus 300/600 wasn't good enough to compete with PC100.
VC100, VC133, DDR 200 and DDR 266 standards offer substantial performance increases over PC100 at little additional cost. Rambus 400/800 will offer less of an increase over 300/600, and 300/600 couldn't compete with PC100 - therefore I expect 400/800 to be even less competitive against VC and DDR.
By the way, DDR 400 standards are being developed to yield the same per pin transfer rates as rambus, and don't require a 64 bit bus any more than rambus does. Did you think that rambus has some sort of divine claim to high per pin data rates? It is a currently available implementation, and a painfully expensive one at the present time. Additional pins don't cost that much. By the time rambus cost comes down, it will have lost its one remaining advantage (lower pin count).
Rambus's business plan assumed that its competition would never improve - a very bad assumption to make in the high tech electronics industry.
Dan |
