Dave B & Longs... Interesting post from h0db on Yahoo...
rsuckla
by: h0db (40/M/Tysons Corner, VA)
7/27/00 8:56 am
Msg: 141241 of 141325
The piece (with the edits) is interesting, but the requirements for memory bandwidth are not a simple mathematical exercise.
There are VERY few applications that can saturate the memory bandwidth provided by PC100 SDRAM, let alone PC800
RDRAM. If you are creative, you can see what Rambus can do for you under severe memory bandwidth deman conditions.
A couple of websites pointed this out, along with MaximumPC. They gave a top "10" rating to the Dell Dimension
XPS-B866r, and then followed up with a torture trial description a month or so later. They ran three or four concurrent
SETI@Home clients, and then copied a CD to a CD-RW (ATAPI, not SCSI) while playing Quake3Arena. Only a Rambus
PC can do this--Quake3 played normally (thanks also to a 64MB GeForce DDR card), the CD-RW worked perfectly, and
each SETI session worked near maximum throughput. But only extreme multitasking environments like this can fully take
advantage of of RDRAM's bandwidth.
Otherwise, the slowest part of the system will be the bottleneck. This can be latency buses (ISA or PCI), the hard drive
subsystem (especially if the busmastering is inefficient) or the video subsystem.
The Pentium-4 should be different, and not just because of the 400MHz FSB and RDRAM. It is a zero-legacy plaform (no
ISA bus AT ALL) and USB2.0-certified (which approaches firewire for peripheral device speeds). I fully expect Pentium-4
to settle this RDRAM performance debate once and for all.
This is my benchmark: a Pentium-4 with PC800 (or PC1000) RDRAM running at the minimum 1.3GHz should have
TWICE the memory throughput (measured by benchmarks like Sandra) of a 1GHz T-bird or Pentium-3, and run at least
30% faster in every application that is CPU dependent or memory dependent. And RDRAM should cost no more than 50%
more than PC133 SDRAM at launch (Sept-Oct) and that delta should decline to 5% over six months. In otherwords, when
people see Pentium-4, they should not even think about using anything other than RDRAM in it, from a performance/price
perspective.
The other income streams are gravy--PS-2 is a given, and some royalty streams from SDRAM, controllers, DDR, and logic
are likely but will take longer to be realized.
I still think that Rambus is hugely oversold, and that Edelstone's target of $200/share is likely over the next 6-9 months. I'm
holding. |
