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

To: wily who wrote (34288)	11/12/1999 2:41:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Respond to of 93625

Wily, <What would AMD's reason be for supporting Rambus?> If I had to guess, I'd say that AMD's upcoming two-way chipset will support dual RDRAM channels, just like Intel's new 840 chipset. Once you get over the initial hurdles of RDRAM, adding a second memory channel to the chipset is trivial because of the low pin count. For high-end workstations and low-end servers, the extra memory bandwidth is well worth it. In more technical terms, it's likely that AMD wanted to stick to a single north-bridge design. But that north bridge needs to support two Athlon buses (point-to-point), an AGP-4x bus, a PCI bus (or some other north-to-south-bridge interconnect), and the dual memory channel. The pin count rises really quickly, and the electricals are already pretty complicated. Had AMD gone with DDR, either the north bridge would be incredibly complicated (high pin-count, electrical signaling, power, etc.), or a separate memory bridge would have been required, but that increases latency. This is all in my own opinion. Comments from the more technically-endowed are welcome. Tenchusatsu