Re: I guess the "technologically advanced" people picked the wrong DRAM, didn't they?
There was a period, about 6 months to a year ago, when there was tremendous "buzz" regarding rambus. That decision may have been made around then. It may be that it will be changed.
But the initial Itaniums will come out without Rambus for similar reasons (designed before Rambus), when for marketing reasons Intel might be better off if it were used, regardless of price/performance. And, unless Rambus collapses completely, the next iteration of Itanium chipsets will probably use Rambus. So the initial EV7s chipsets may come out with Rambus, and that may or may not change later.
There is a lot of lead time associated with many of these decisions.
Rambus might make more sense for some very large systems if they can get the latency down - but the EV7 chipset uses (as best as I can recall) 8 rambus channels, giving it the same data channel width as dual DDR channels. This isn't really Rambus in the sense that a narrow, high speed data path is used. This is a very wide, high speed data channel, closer in concept to the dual DDR proposed for Sledgehammer.
Start with rambus, widen it from 16 bits back to 64 bits, slow it down just enough so it can be manufactured reliably, speed up the RAM core and cut out the multiplexing junk in the back end to eliminate the latency penalty, and you've got a good solution - DDR.
Regards,
Dan |
