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

To: Scumbria who wrote (43999)	6/10/2000 7:26:00 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Scumbria; Re servers and memory bandwidth... In servers, system memory bandwidth is critical, but the bandwidth of individual chips doesn't matter as much. The granularity problem that requires individual chips to have very high bandwidths is a problem of the low end of memory systems, not the high end. They could get by without DDR in servers with no big deal. The reason they prefer a DDR design to SDRAM (for future systems) is because the memory costs are the same, and DDR saves a few bucks (do to reduction in pin count) on the memory controller. DDR lets them give the same system bandwidth with fewer memory channels. They might be able to save a few bucks on the controller chip with RDRAM, but they would more than give it back in RDRAM vs SDRAM/DDR memory costs. -- Carl P.S. I hope you enjoyed the (fantasy) flight back from Taipei as much as I did. Nothing like a Gulfstream jet (with in flight massages) to make those 18 hour plane flights pleasant. The parts of the trip that will always remain in my memory is the great time we had on those expensive golf courses with all the local memory module makers. They thought it was so funny that they were getting warrants and cash from Rambus while they were supporting DDR behind their backs! (giggle)

To: Scumbria who wrote (43999)	6/11/2000 7:41:00 PM
From: Steve Lee	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

You are wrong. Please stop distorting facts. Your comments about "effective memory bandwidth" including pagefile considerations are complete waffle. It's not a case of paging to disk, it's a case of whether data has to be read from disk, or from a file/database cache in RAM. The important RAM consideration in a server is most definitely capacity rather than bandwidth. With current available Rambus technology, for 4 GB RAM, you would need, I believe, 8 Rambus channels. This would make for a very expensive chipset giving peak mem bandwidth of 12.8 Gb/s. It is rare to find a server with more than a 1Gb/s network connection (usually much less) so such a chipset would be a waste of resources. SDRAM/DDR performance is plenty. If a single channel Rambus chipset could give multi Gigabyte RAM capacity, then Rambus server chipsets would be justified. The capacity is the only consideration for not having RDRAM in servers. Cost/performance are irrelevant in comparison.