Hi all; RDRAM ASSPs of January 1999. Where are they now?
Looking further at REH's list, (See #reply-7529494 ) here are the companies that made Application-Specific Standard Products that used RDRAM back in January 1999. Here's the complete list, and what they're doing now as far as ASSPs (not memory or general purpose ASIC support) for DDR and RDRAM:
Application-Specific Standard Product (ASSP) IC Products
- Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (DDR only)
- Compaq Computer Corporation (Sells DDR based Presario 7000 series.)
- Cirrus Logic Inc. (Designed obselete Rambus based video card,
Laguna. CL-GD5464 CL-GD5465 chip. Only uses SDRAM now.)
- Chromatic Research, Inc. (Designed a Concurrent RDRAM video card,
now obsolete. Bot by ATI. ATI now makes no RDRAM products, but
has plenty of DDR graphics cards.)
- Intel Corporation (Working hard on DDR chipsets.)
- LG Semicon Co., Ltd. (Bought by Hyundai, '96 mPact product line uses
one 16Mbit RDRAM chip, now obsolete.) See:
kotra.or.kr
- LSI Logic Corporation (Still with RDRAM in the Sony product, no
other ASSPs use DDR or RDRAM)
- Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic used up to
six 16Mbit RDRAM chips in TV chipset, now obsolete. No new DDR or
RDRAM ASSPs.)
- NEC Corporation (No longer sells RDRAM ASSPs. I don't know
what the one they used to have was. Instead, has a DDR based
video card. Sells DDR based PCs.)
- Oki Electric Industrial Co.,Ltd. (No RDRAM or DDR ASSPs.)
- S3 Incorporated (Developed Nintendo's RDRAM based machine, soon to
be replaced with a non RDRAM based design. S3 sold their graphics
division to VIA, which now only uses DDR.)
- ST Microelectronics (Developed mPact, an RDRAM based media processor
that, according to Toshiba, used (now obsolete) Base and Concurrent
RDRAM only. They sold the line to Max Internet Communications Inc.,
www.maxic.com, which now sells the MAX I.C.LIVE 3600 Media processor
card. Neither ST Microelectronics nor Max is listed on the Rambus
page as using RDRAM, so I'm guessing that they removed the RDRAM
from the design.)
- Texas Instruments Incorporated (Developed the TNETX4090 Ethernet
ThunderSwitch, it's now obsolete. No new RDRAM ASSPs. Now no DDR
or RDRAM ASSPs.)
- Toshiba Corporation (Developed the Toshiba mPact2/6000 media processor
(see ST Microelectronics for the rest of the story.)
- Videologic Group plc. (Used the Cirrus Laguna chipsets to make
video cards. Now only uses SDRAM in their graphics cards.)
That's the complete list. The only companies still selling RDRAM based chipsets are Intel and LSI-Logic, for Sony. In just 30 months, Rambus lost every other ASSP design win, and a lot of them were replaced with, you guessed it, DDR. Why are Intel and Sony the last RDRAM users? It's a matter of time to market. Of the above companies, they're the ones that are slowest to get new product out the door. That's why it's taking Intel so long to get their DDR chipsets ready.
-- Carl |
