Any comments on the following points, anybody?
messages.yahoo.com
"Well, one nice thing about the communications apps is that their stuff is (A) very proprietary [they probably only have one or two fabs making their PCBs], (B) very controlled [they only have one design for the PCB], and (C) they can solder down parts, and need fewer of them. At least, I think they're generally looking at 32-64M of RAM on most of those. It is amazing how much difference this makes in terms of ease of design and stuff. That's partly why we have reliable 366Mhz DDR on video cards [soldered down, reference design], and not on motherboards. High-volume manufacturing from 20 different motherboard houses, with varying levels of quality, but each doing darn near anything they can to save a few pennies per motherboard, is REALLY REALLY hard when you have tight signal tolerances and you have guaranteed discontinuities in the signal paths [connectors!].
The biggest advantage I see in the RAMBUS technology is the fact that the maximum bandwidth is available with a single chip. To get 1.6Gb/sec from DDR you would need a 32-bit wide, 200mhz [400MT] DDR chip. Although they make such things, it does have significantly more pins than the RAMBUS chip does.
This is one of the reasons you would want it in a PC as well, because a standard chipset doesn't have much [logic] to it, and if you were to put a 250-pin simple chipset device on a 0.18u process you would be entirely pad-limited -- a waste of manufacturing resources. That's partly why a lot of manufacturers are integrating more and more stuff onto their chipests [like 3d accelerators, LAN, etc]. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more UMA-type devices [ala XBOX] with extremely high-performance memory subsystems and CPU controllers. Lots of advantages."
BP |
