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

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (40307)	4/19/2000 4:09:00 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Tenchusatsu, Not really. Foster is for servers, while Willamette is for performance workstations. Performance is measured differently between the two. This is one thing I was wondering about, but I have not seen it discussed anywhere. My understanding of SDRAM (forget DDR for a moment) is that SDRAM has lower latency and lower bandwidth compared to Rambus. This in my opinion would favor SDRAM in desktop applications where you have a lot of looping and branching with unpredictable results, and the code spend a lot of time calling API functions from the OS, and you have very little demand for bandwidth. This is why the fastest SDRAM (PC-133 CAS2) handily beats RDRAM, as demonstrated by Tom Pabst. On the other hand, the servers usually just serve data or do some operations on huge amounts of data, for example search all subscribers of SI whose second letter of their name is 'e' and last letter is 'u' and return all their posts within last year. There isn't any unpredictable branching, just a lot of searching of memory (if the server has enough memory, if it doesn't, RDRAM vs. SDRAM won't matter). So anyway, this is where all you need is bandwidth (advantage RDRAM vs. SDRAM) and a lot of memory (if money is a concern, advantage SDRAM). This is the source of my misunderstanding of Intel strategy: RDRAM for Timna, Coppermine, Willy, but DDR SDRAM for servers. Now back to DDR vs. RDRAM, the lower bandwidth of standard SDRAM is no longer an issue, so DDR is the winner on all fronts. What am I missing here? Joe