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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Scumbria who wrote (37187)9/18/1998 4:45:00 PM
From: Paul Engel  Read Replies (2) of 1571926
 
Scumbria - re: " When is Intel going to start incorporating embedded
DRAM? Tightly coupled DRAM would give the performance a big bump up."

Embedded DRAM has three major problems - assuming "conventional" DRAM.

1. It is too slow. Current SRAM technology can run at speeds up to 500 MHz or more - Only RAMBUS-type of DRAMS can come close to this.

2. It is VOLATILE - and it requires continual refreshing. This makes it impractical for power-down operations and other power-savings schemes.

3. The process technology is VERY, VERY different - requiring either deep trenches in the silicon substrate for vertical poly storage gates OR multiple layers of polysilicon for stacked capacitors. These are very exotic, complex front end processes and get in the way of optimizing basic transistor speed characteristics.

For graphics accelerators, these drawbacks are not serious - but they are for ultra-high speed CPUs.

Re: " Intel invested heavily in Samsung. What was the reason for that?"

Intel has an investment of about $250,000,000 in a Samsung Memory Fab in Texas. My guess is that Intel wanted to "help" Samsung see their way clear to supporting RAMBUS memory - which they have.

Samsung also is pursuing non-RAMBUS advanced memory technology.

Paul
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