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

To: Goutam who wrote (78485)	11/3/1999 3:28:00 PM
From: Paul Engel	Respond to of 1575428

Goutama - Re: "Nintendo is switching to embedded VC DDRSDRAM in their future game box." Perhaps. But RDRAM is STILL INSIDE every existing Nintendo 64 machine. Paul

To: Goutam who wrote (78485)	11/3/1999 7:09:00 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 1575428

Hi Goutama Sai Kantamaneni; I, too, saw the confusing report about embedded VC SDRAM in the new Nintendo. Of course, no such thing exists. The next Nintendo machine uses two types of RAM, an embedded SRAM/DRAM for the graphics, and a proprietary DDR type discrete DRAM for main memory. The published report confounded these two memories into just one, and got an embedded DDR memory. As an additional confusion, the Mosys people refer to their pseudo static embedded DRAM as an "SRAM". I believe the following link will dispel the confusion regarding the memory on this machine: Toshiba, NEC push embedded memory ahead NEC will invest about $755 million on a fab to make Nintendo's graphics chip, which uses a one-transistor SRAM cell from MoSys Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.). The fab will also build a discrete high-speed DRAM for Dolphin. The DRAM will be "an application-specific memory" with a data transfer rate of 3.2 Gbytes/ second-presumably, based on the emerging DDR II specification-and dedicated for use in Dolphin, said Keiichi Shimakura, associate senior vice president of NEC. ... Although MoSys calls its technology an embedded SRAM for marketing reasons, it is actually an embedded DRAM: DRAMs have one transistor and one capacitor in each storage location, while SRAMs have four- or six-transistor cells, said Steve Przybylski, principal consultant with Verdande Group. techweb.com Note that the above memory provides twice the bandwidth of a Direct RDRAM memory. As long as I am searching EE-Times, here's an announcement of IBM picking up the SOC win for the design: IBM Grabs Next Nintendo System Chip Contract The estimated $1 billion win, snatched from the jaws of long-time Nintendo partner NEC, has the potential to make IBM the dominant figure in ASICs at the 0.18-micron generation, and to establish the PowerPC as the highest-volume RISC processor. techweb.com I believe that in the future of low end machines, IBM will be a major player. -- Carl