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

To: TigerPaw who wrote (35938)	12/18/1999 9:19:00 AM
From: dumbmoney	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Intel supports PC133 This has been on the roadmap a long time. It's for the next generation of low cost machines. Nobody has tried to say Intel is going to drop everything for Rambus, only that it is the future, and the future begins now. A little bit of revisionism there. In fact, Intel did drop everything for Rambus, and as late as August Intel was telling the world that they would never support PC133, that Rambus was it. When I predicted that Intel would reverse themselves and support PC133, the Rambus bulls said I was crazy. The future has been postponed again: tomshardware.com My next prediction is that Intel will support DDR. The benchmark results confirm it as inevitable.

To: TigerPaw who wrote (35938)	12/18/1999 10:04:00 AM
From: cfimx	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

will rdram be used in future Intel servers? Isn't memory limited to 1 gigabyte currently?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (35938)	12/18/1999 10:33:00 AM
From: cfimx	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

i know this is old but could some of you "axes" address some of the points made in this article: AMD favors PC133, DDR SDRAM over Rambus for Athlon By Anthony Cataldo EE Times (08/17/99, 4:26 p.m. EDT) TOKYO - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. said it will lean heavily on PC133 and double-data-rate synchronous DRAMs to boost the performance of its new Athlon processors, putting Rambus memory on the back burner because of the latter's high initial cost and the DDR SDRAM's comparable performance. ?We've been talking about Rambus a long time, and it was looking like it would be the foremost architecture,? said Samuel Rogan, AMD's marketing manager for Japan and Korea. ?There will be a time when that will happen, but probably not until the end of 2000 or 2001.? The problem with Rambus is that the extra cost, which Rogan estimates will be $60 to $80 per motherboard, is hard to justify given that SDRAM-particularly DDR-will provide equal or better bandwidth, he said. During its presentation on the Athlon processor here, AMD showed a slide indicating that 100-MHz double-data-rate SDRAM with a standard 64-bit memory bus will provide 1.6 Gbytes/second of bandwidth, equal to a 400-MHz (800 MHz effective) Rambus DRAM running on Rambus' proprietary 16-bit serial bus. DDR SDRAMs with a core frequency of 133 MHz (266 MHz effective) will ratchet up memory bandwidth to 2.1 Gbytes/s, according to the company. ?Rambus boasts higher frequency on data transfers, but because of the narrower pipe they do not get the same data throughput as you do with DDR,? Rogan said. ?Since DDR has comparable or better performance than a Rambus solution at a better cost, the motherboard guys like it. And the DRAM manufacturers don't have to retool.? Rambus is expected to hit the market next month with the introduction of Intel's Camino chip set, which will include a Rambus interface and is expected to support 4x AGP. Depite a delay in the chip set introduction and the high cost of Rambus DRAM, Intel continues to promote Rambus as the next mainstream memory technology after PC100, though more recently the company said it will consider introducing a PC133 chip set as well. By contrast, AMD will look to follow third-party chip set suppliers and memory manufacturers that are offering a wide choice of memory types. For example, the new Apollo KX133 chip set from Via Technologies Inc. supports 133-MHz SDRAMs, 4x AGP as well as the 200-MHz front-side bus geared for Athlon. Just what will PC makers get for moving to a faster processor bus and SDRAM? According to Asao Ishizu ka, an industry consultant who tests motherboards and writes for Nikkei Business Publications, making the switch from a system with a 100-MHz front-side bus and PC100 SDRAMs to one with a 133-MHz front-side bus-capable chip set and 133-MHz SDRAMs increases memory subsystem performance more than 20 percent. What's more, using NEC's 133-MHz variant of SDRAM, known as Virtual Channel Memory, with a 133-MHz front-side bus yields a memory subsystem performance rise of more than 50 percent over systems with PC100 SDRAMs and a 100-MHz front-side bus, Ishizuka said. Though he hasn't completed tests for non-Intel chip sets capable of 4x AGP using the faster DRAMs, Ishizuka said he expects a substantial improvement for graphics and game applications. Presently, PC100 SDRAM provide sufficient memory bandwidth for 2x AGP, so using faster memory with 2x AGP chip sets provides only negligible performance gains, he said.?You can gain a lot with PC133 and you can gain more with Virtual Channel, as expected,? (Ishizuka's results were based on a Stream for DOS benchmark. The test system used a First International Computer motherboard with a 600-MHz Pentium III CPU, 128 Mbytes of RAM and Via's Apollo Pro 133 chip set. Both the PC133 and PC100 CAS-2 double-sided dual-in-line memory modules were manufactured by Micron Technology. NEC provided the Virtual Channel Memory module.)