Hi Orion; Funny thing, is I agree that Rambus's natural domain is the low end. The basic advantage of Rambus is in its ability to provide high bandwidth with a low memory chip count. This is the same as the "granularity" advantage. This is what makes it a natural in the game box market. I have had some thoughts on how we can quantify the degree to which the memory market is beset by granularity problems, and I will post them over on the AMD, INTC and RMBS and all that thread after I have got them typed in, by the way.
The reason I say that the advantage is in bandwidth per chip, rather than bandwidth per pin, is that the packaging business has gone through quite a revolution on packages. Very high pin count packages are now available, and this reduces a lot of the attraction of rambus. Incidentally, this same per pin cost reduction also applies to memory chips, so they can increase bandwidths per chip any time they want to, as well. In fact, specialty memory has been available 32-bits wide for around 4 years. The fact that the general memory market has not sold a whole lot of high bandwidth memory is an indication of the small (natural) size of the market that RDRAM has to sell into, not that previous memory generations were unable to achieve this. Intel has tried to force the box makers into the market for high bandwidth memory, but this may not be something that they will be able to pull off.
-- Carl |
