Thursday November 12 4:40 PM ET
RAM maker shifts gears
PC Week
By John G. Spooner, ZDNet
A groundswell of activity will surround Rambus Inc.'s high-speed RDRAM at next week's Comdex.
While the technology has been in development for several years, Rambus and partners such as Kingston Technology Co. will report at the Las Vegas show that Rambus dynamic RAM memory modules will be in volume production in the first half of next year. PC OEMs are expected to ship their first desktops supporting RDRAM, thanks to an Intel Corp. chip set, code-named Camino, in the second half of next year.
For users, the upshot of direct RDRAM will be system performance boosts, which stem from increasing a PC's memory bus speed. While processor speeds have grown to 450MHz this year and will continue to climb past 500MHz next year, memory bus speeds lag behind at 100MHz or 66MHz. RDRAM, which can support bus speeds as high as 800MHz, promises to close that gap by tripling effective memory bus bandwidth, allowing a PC's processor to receive and process instructions more quickly, said Subodh Toprani, vice president of logic products at Rambus, in Mountain View, Calif.
Memory vendors such as Kingston have begun offering sample memory modules and testing equipment to PC OEMs. Kingston is now producing RDRAM in small quantities and in the next two months will equip its manufacturing facilities to produce RDRAM in volume, said John Sutherland, director of new product development at the Fountain Valley, Calif., company.
Samsung Semiconductor Inc. and Micron Technology Corp. have both announced they will also ramp manufacturing capacities for RDRAM.
Premium price to start
While RDRAM will command a price premium at the outset, it should quickly become price-competitive with existing memory technology, such as DRAM.
After crashing to about $2 per megabyte earlier this year, DRAM prices have begun to increase due to a short supply created by manufacturers shifting production capacities or shutting down plants, Sutherland said.
"It's frustrating some of our customers that something they could buy for $100 last week is $176 this week," he said. But once RDRAM is readily available, it should cost "a little bit more, but the increase in performance outweighs the extra $10 to $15 in cost."
Since it licensed RDRAM technology to Intel in 1996, Rambus has secured several other licensees. They include Advanced Micro Devices Inc., for its K7 processors, and Compaq Computer Corp., for its Alpha processors. Cyrix Corp., a subsidiary of National Semiconductor Corp., has also shown a processor with Rambus technology on a chip.
The technology, which supports power management, will likely be available for notebooks when Intel ships a supporting chip set, code-named Colfax, next year.
Rambus can be reached at www.rambus.com.
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