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

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (80833)	11/23/1999 4:53:00 PM
From: Petz	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1573812

Bill, another touted advantage of RDRAM that its "granularity" is smaller. Both RDRAM and SDRAM are made of the same storage chips, its the interfacing thats different. Nearly all individual RAM chips are made 4 bits wide or less. This means you have to put at least 16 chips together to make a standard 64-bit-wide SDRAM DIMM. If you are using 64 megabit chips (16Meg x 4 bits), the smallest SDRAM you can make is 128 megs. The RAM makers want to start making 256 Meg chips organized as 64 Meg by 4 bits. The smallest standard SDRAM you could make with such chips is 512 megs. The smallest possible RDRAM using these chips would be 128 megs, because the bus width is only 16 bits. IMHO, by time the majority of RAM production moves over to 256 megabit DRAM's, the typical PC will have 512M of RAM anyway, so I think this is a non-issue. Actually, the bigger problem with RDRAM right now is that no one is selling RDRAM bigger than 128M, which means that those Camino-chipset motherboards are limited to 256M of RAM, 1/3 the max on a typical Athlon system. Petz