Lies, Damned Lies, and a Different Perspective
hardwarecentral.com
Conclusion
Sander Sassen
Intel has chosen to implement support for the RDRAM memory architecture in its i820/i840 and upcoming chipsets. Most people in the industry think they've bet on the wrong horse, as the promised performance benefits don't show up in most of today's benchmarks. But let's be fair here; a couple of years ago we still used EDO RAM and SDRAM was something new and pretty expensive. In hindsight we've seen the benefits of using SDRAM and its impact on overall system performance. But if we look at the performance benefits SDRAM offered in its early days on applications that were then popular, it also didn't seem to offer huge advantages. Still, we've come a long way, and SDRAM performance has indeed improved although the technology at first didn't seem to promise that much of an improvement.
However, due to the growing demand in memory bandwidth, the arrival of GHz CPUs and the ever-growing demands of today's software, SDRAM seems to have run into bandwidth limitations. Whereas DDR SDRAM and VCDRAM might be able to hold off the introduction of a new memory standard for a while, it is inevitable. While DDR SDRAM might promise increased memory bandwidth, it will run into severe timing, latency and propagation delay problems due to the wide databus and ever increasing clockspeeds. Memory may then be cheap to produce, but motherboards will then need to have six or even eight PCB layers to be able to run these memory modules at such high data rates and clockspeeds, thus increasing motherboard costs substantially.
RDRAM is not perfect, but it is currently one of the most promising solutions to bandwidth, latency and propagation delay problems, and is scalable, a distinct advantage. It is expensive, but that's partly because it's new and the market has not caught on yet. Once more manufacturers start selling RDRAM and it becomes as commonplace as SDRAM now is, we will see its prices dropping, too. Due to the nature of the manufacturing process it will probably never be as affordable as SDRAM, but then again SDRAM doesn't offer the same performance, which is what you're actually paying for. Better technology usually comes at a price; you don?t expect your sub-$1000 PC to perform as well as a $5000 top-of-the-line model, do you?
Sander Sassen |
