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

To: charred water who wrote (52888)	9/9/2000 1:25:14 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 93625

Hi charred water; Re two different ports for SDRAM and DDR. There are a couple of significant points with this. (1) In modern electronic design, pins are very cheap, so why not put in two ports, if it provides more utility to the consumer? Rambus was founded as an attempt to save pins, that is, to give high bandwidth with low pin counts. Transmeta's blithely tossing an extra x64 SDRAM port on their chip is an indication that Rambus is a bit out of date. (2) SDRAM and DDR use different signaling levels &c. I suppose you could make an interface compatible with both, but by putting two ports on the part, Transmeta avoided the (possibly difficult) engineering. VIA and ALi, on the other hand, are making chipsets with single memory ports that can either connect to SDRAM or DDR, depending on the whim of the motherboard designer. (3) Wide width, soldered down DDR is old technology now with lots of implementations, particularly from Nvidia. DDR SODIMMs are still getting put to bed, and do not have performance as high as DDR DIMMs, increasing the attraction of putting DDR on the motherboard. But that would leave a motherboard with no user serviceable memory (and it is still too early for my prediction on that to come true), so Transmeta added an SDRAM port suitable for SODIMM SDRAM modules. -- Carl