Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin Message Board

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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin

RMBS 101.61

+2.8%

Dec 5 9:30 AM EST

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To: jhg_in_kc who wrote (28931)	9/8/1999 12:02:00 AM
From: grok	of 93625

RE: "<high granularity> why is this good for desktops but not for servers? anyone? eom" It is not really good for much of anything in PCs at this particular point in time. But, in the future, it is expected to be very important in small systems. Today, most computers talk to memory across 64 wires. The most popular type of memory chip has 16 wires so 4 of these are used together to form 64 wires. But you really can't have less than 4 memory chips or there'd be nothing to drive some of the 64 wires. The Rambus Direct Rdram memory chip is designed differently so that it talks to the rest of the computer across only 16 wires and, so, you can have only 1 memory chip if that's all the memory you need. Granularity means the amount of variation in the memory size that you can have. In the former case you must have a total memory that is a multiple of 4 but in the Rambus case it can be 1, 2, 3, ... In about 1988 or 89 Mark Horowitz and Mike Farmwald told me that they were thinking about forming a company based on revising the dram interface to provide a narrow, high speed interface. They explained it and asked what I thought. I told them that electrically it seemed pretty hairy but if they could solve that then in about 5 years it would be great due to the granularity problem. Well I missed that by a lot. At that time I never would have dreamed that I'd be sitting in my den typing this message on a PC with 256 MB. The amount of memory in a computer has sky rocketed incredibly. This is usually blamed on Microsoft for their inefficient software. (Not really fair.) Also, the amount of memory on a memory chip has not grown as fast as expected. 10 years ago all the dram makers were showing charts that predicted that the most popular memory in the year 2000 would be 1 Gbit (a billion bits) but actually it will be 128 Mbits maybe switching to 256 Mbits near the end of the year. In any case, the "granularity wall" in PCs is still in the future. In certain other products like Consumer Game Consoles or Graphics Cards we are there now. In PCs it's not clear just when it will happen. But you can get some good arguments going just by bring it up!

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