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

To: Road Walker who wrote (120465)	7/18/2000 10:15:01 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572449

John, I thought there was a much higher price premium for RDRAM? The prices in your link are for samples. Joe

To: Road Walker who wrote (120465)	7/18/2000 10:27:52 AM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572449

Dear John: This is for chips. The big cost is in assembling these chips into modules. You either have to sort (hand pick) the chips into a module (4 chips = 128MB, 8 = 256MB, and 16 = 512MB), or place them on a module where the lowest speed chip determines the module speed (and if any are bad the whole module is thrown out). This is different for DDR SDRAM where the tolerances are far higher and the chips can be reliably tested individually. Thus the module yield for RDRAM is far less than the module yield for DDRDRAM. Thus at a chip level the DR/DDR ratio is 150 / 120 or 25% greater while at a module level 300 / 125 or 140% greater. Also the speed penalty for DR is much greater, thus increasing the spread between the 600 MHz and 800 MHz module prices. Thus the cost difference is not much for one to two chip modules for things like game consoles (where DR makes sense) where PCs with 4 to 16 chips have a much larger difference (where DR is overpriced). Pete