Hi cordob; The pricing is the average of the five lowest priced modules showing up in the 256MB PC133, PC2100 and PC800 categories on PriceWatch.
Notes:
(1) RDRAM is cheaper in pairs so you have to be careful here.
(2) Every now and then obsolete PC600 stock shows up and you have to avoid those prices too.
(3) I used to take pricing more or less daily, but it got to be way too long, and too much trouble. So now I try to get figures for after US market close on Fridays.
(4) The oldest price dates to March 26, 2001: #reply-15563113
(5) The rules for calculating the prices were set forth here: #reply-15563097
I would think that to most Rambus investors, having RDRAM only 70% more expensive than SDRAM would count as "price parity". Of course to industry that ain't the case.
Re Samsung's comment that RDRAM, SDRAM and DDR are at price parity, with DDR cheaper than SDRAM. It's true that DDR slipped slightly below SDRAM prices this past week, at least for chips with the same organization and density. But on average, SDRAM isn't manufactured at the same organization and density as DDR. So the figures that I use for the cheapest modules still show DDR considerably more expensive than SDRAM. Of course there is also a delay between chip pricing and module pricing, and there are also differences between the popcorn logic on the modules. The same applies to DDR vs RDRAM prices.
It's not surprising that Hammer is supporting unregistered DDR. (1) As you note, it's faster. In fact, since the memory interface is built into the CPU that machine is going to be screaming fast. (2) The Hammer has a 128-bit wide bus, so that means that it can support twice as much unregistered DDR as a 64-bit wide bus machine, provided that they implemented separate address / control buses. (3) Hammer is for the future, and industry will have 512Mbit chips as mainstream then. With 512Mb x8 DDR SDRAM, it would be reasonable to get 1 to 4 rows of memory to work unregistered. With a 128-bit bus, that works out to memory sizes from 1 to 4 GByte. I'm sure they figured that that was where the sweet spot for the Hammer memory type would be.
But I would still expect that they would support registered DDR. Are they not going to support registered DDR at all? If so, kindly send a note to Jdaasoc, who's been arguing with me about the significance of registered DDR for most of a year.
-- Carl |
