Re: surely you don't really think intel, dell, ibm, cpq, samsung, sony and toshiba
I think they made that decision 3 years ago when they thought DRDRAM would be available 1 year ago and wouldn't cost half again as much as SDRAM.
>>you might buy a pc133 machine with one dimm....
more likely that you might buy a Rambus machine with one RIMM, then find it becomes unreliable when you add more. It's harder to daisy chain 400MHZ parts than 133MHZ parts.
>>the situation for sdram becomes grim as granularity increases
That's nonsense, SDRAM is already being made as x8, x16, and x32. x32 parts are 2 per DIMM for 64 bits. For example, Samsung's SGDRAM, that they are suggesting be used instead of Rambus on high performance video cards, is X32.
usa.samsungsemi.com
"Samsung's 222 MHz SGRAM provides up to 55% improvement in memory performance compared to today's "best of class" systems, and provides an evolutionary alternative to current and future technologies, such as Rambus© DRAM and DDR DRAM for graphics applications. The device is faster than the fastest 1MX16 SDRAM, and faster than the fastest 2MX32 SDRAM on the market today. On a 64-bit bus controller, the device provides 8Bytes x 222MHz, delivering 1.8Gbytes-per-second, and on a 128-bit bus controller, it provides 16Bytes x 222 MHz, delivering an outstanding 3.5Gbytes-per-second that dramatically enhances graphics performance. This further reinforces the performance differential between graphics and system memory."
If Rambus starts to look like a dead end after a few months of low sales due to high price, limited availability, and no performance advantage on real applications, it's Rambus that nobody will want to touch, techies or not.
Dan |
