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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Walliker who wrote (26130)	8/1/1999 11:02:00 AM
From: grok	Respond to of 93625

RE: <The Prophet, Based on your expertise, would you say that DDR can compete with RMBS for some indefinite period of time before RMBS' scalability ultimately defeats it? Or would you say it cannot compete at all? I am a mere amateur. But, I am sure there will be a big battle and the physics of Rambus will win in the end. As for when? I can only guess. John> I think that the key factor for rambus to gain dominance will be for 3D graphics to become a standard part of every desktop PC. There is a lot of momemtum behind the Unified Memory Architecture for storing 3D texture data in main memory. In this case the demand for bandwidth goes way up and it is not peak bandwidth but sustained bandwidth that is needed. While it is true that the ddr-sdram ram roadmap will eventually pass a single drdram channel in bandwidth on a 64 bit bus, rambus will have two advantages: 1. The rambus bandwidth is more sustainable due to higher bus utilization rates. 2. (and this is the bigger advantage) rambus allows more than one channel to be used so in the future we are sure to see Camino-like chips with 2, 3, or 4 or more drdram channels. Also, eventually dram chips become so dense that granularity becomes a factor. Imagine a system with a chip set with very powerful built in 3D and 4 drdram channels with one 512Mbit chip on each channel. That gives 256 MBytes main/texture memory and 4*1.6 = 6.4 GB/s bandwith. ddr-sdram can't compete with this. I think that Intel is working towards making systems like this becoming the standard (except maybe they're working toward merging the CPU with the chip set as in Timna as the standard).