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To: NightOwl who wrote (48994)	8/5/2000 6:45:18 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi NightOwl; Re your eight questions... (1) What exactly does "packetized" mean? If it means that memory can be more quickly accessed in chunks of adjacent memory locations, then SDRAM and DDR as well as RDRAM are packetized. If it means something else, then it is merely a detail of how data is got into and out of the memory, and the higher level details do not apply any more than a radio listener cares whether his station is AM or FM. (2,3) Actually, DDR has a minimum packet size of 128 bits (on a 64-bit wide interface) which I think is the same as RDRAM. No advantage for either technology. (4) With regard to writing odd sized words... As long as the memory is not ECC, I believe that there won't be a difference. But ECC is not pretty to SDRAM or DDR SDRAM when single bytes are written. The memory controller has to turn a byte write into a read modify write in order to get the ECC correct. This is more naturally done in RDRAM. (In other words, RDRAM is better at this.) Of course, for hardware, memory always resides at the address where it is supposed to... (5) Yeah, lots of variables. But writers of software typically either don't care about performance or do care, and understand enough details that they can choose to avoid byte-wide writes, for instance. Humans are pretty adept little creatures. -- Carl