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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (73710)	10/2/1999 4:10:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572999

Hi Tenchusatsu; I think he's talking about the granularity available with RIMM modules. You could field a system with only one RDRAM per RIMM, thereby getting extremely good granularity. This is what makes RDRAM such a natural for game platforms - they don't need a lot of RAM, but do need a lot of bandwidth. SDRAM gets its bandwidth by adding chips, so you can never add just one chip. (Newer SDRAM chips are coming out with much increased pinouts, though. This should help SDRAM stave off granularity for another generation. Seems sort of like the oil shortage predicted in the 70s. Twenty-five years have gone by, why is it that we are still swimming in oil? My guess is that sometimes (okay, always), the experts aren't too good at predicting future trends. In fact, for us mortals, the future is no more than a very cloudy proposition, and that is only when it is something other than darkest night.) The other day, I looked at some Athlon systems, and the least memory I could find was 96MB. This suggests that the granularity issue has not yet arrived, in that it is clear that the granularity for the Athlon system (with that memory) was 32MB, but there was evidently no demand for systems with less than 32MB. When consumers compare RDRAM and SDRAM systems, they are very likely to insist on comparisons that are between machines as equivalent as possible. For this reason, I would expect to see no great marketing advantage to Rambus' granularity even at some point in the future where it is significant. What are they going to do, advertise that you can put together a machine that doesn't have as much RAM as the other guy's? Doesn't seem like a great marketing point, sort of like trying to sell extra small condoms. -- Carl

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (73710)	10/2/1999 12:22:00 PM
From: grok	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572999

RE: "<RIMMs could have only 4 Rdrams on them, or even less.> Don't you mean 8, maybe even 16 with a possible double-sided RIMM? Perhaps you got your terms mixed up? Tenchusatsu" I was talking about the minumum, not the maximum. Dan3 said: "If the i840 needs at least two RIMMs it's going to make for some expensive minimum configurations." I believe that there are RIMMs with 4, 8, 10, 12, or 16 Rdrams on them. I don't know if all of them are actually available but I believe that specs at least exist. But if you put a 4-Rdram RIMM on each 840 channel it wouldn't be an expensive minimum system.