Hi Rosemary; The parties in the DRAM battle have a long history of spreading FUD about each other. I don't know what would give you the idea that there is a possibility that DDRs are just theory, there are plenty of samples around, and besides, the engineering community doesn't work that way. I've got two samples myself, (but I haven't powered them up yet). I truly doubt that a manufacturer is going to give out known bad sample chips, it tends to really upset the very engineers that you want to use your product. Given that, I have no reason to doubt the engineering validity of the DDR design. On the other hand, it is a known fact that the DRAM makers are having trouble hitting the target speed on the Direct Rambus chips, particularly as to yield.
I believe that DDR SDRAM is at about the same stage of development as the Direct Rambus is. That is, samples are available, and manufacturers are starting to turn up the volume. Several DRAM makers are supposedly in full production of DDRs, but they are still on allocation, and will remain that way for a while. By the way, if DDRs were not going to be successful, they would be easy to get right now, given the number of makers producing them...
I have no doubt that Rambus has a market niche. But that niche is not the entire DRAM market place. The Rambus niche is for large volume makers of systems that require high bandwidth relative to the memory capacity, like Nintendo. The DDR niche is for small volume systems, plus makers of large capacity, price sensitive memories, like servers. It is just too much of a price disadvantage to use Rambus in places where DDR will work as well.
The next big splash in the DRAM market is embedded DRAM, which will take market share directly from the Rambus end of the market. The idea is called "system on a chip", and it allows extremely high (i.e. much faster than any other technology, including Rambus) bandwidths with relatively small memories. You may not be able to buy any of these products yet either, but they will be here in a few years.
-- Carl |
