Pomp, <The law of uninteded consequences has hit Rambus and Intel several times during development and rollout and the idea that DDR will simply appear in a bug-free, high-performance iteration does not wash with me. >
There is nothing unusual with that. The DDR is
_evolutionary_ technology. That means that all
parts of the product gradually evolve form the
current DRAM technology where huge engineering
experience has been accumulated. The prior
experience will be directly applicable because
the changes in signals are not that big, and
the problem if any can be quickly resolved with
fast and smooth learning curve, with no
unexpected issues. This is an advantage of
"evolution"
With the RAMBUS "revolution", people attempted the
8x jump in frequency. There was no experience in
handling such frequencies in digital domain, the
prior experience and intuition just did not work.
Therefore the results. I am not saying that there
is no one who can understand the problem, but the bulk
of traditional digital designers, who actually do
the job, seems to have little clues about reflections,
impedance matching, and wave dispersions. And most
of them probably never will, judging form the majority
of responses on this and other threads.
No one is saying that the DDR will be totally
bug-free. However, above are the reasons why
transition to DDR is expected to be much smoother
and faster.
Does it make sense to you now?
- Ali |
