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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dmf who wrote (115448)	10/31/2000 9:13:44 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

dmf, However, I had the impression that Intel currently needs Rambus in the high-end market until other solutions are scalable. I ask you the same question I asked Amy: What do you mean by "scalable"? The relevant metrics for memory are latency - how long it takes the to receive the information it asked for bandwidth - how many bytes, megabytes, gigabytes per second of data you can receive. The clock rate of the memory interface has a limited relevance - if this is what you call scalability. There are number of ways to reduce latency, the best is to go to memory as infrequently as possible. The CPUs have increasingly larger and faster caches for this, as well as prediction algorithms for what data and what parts of program will likely be needed next. There are number of approaches to reduce latency further, in case of cache miss. The most promissing is integration of Northbridge on CPU die. As far as bandwidth is concerned, it turned out to be much less of a problem than Intel predicted. Search for increased bandwidth lead Intel down the Rambus route. There are some articles that try to estimate how much bandwidth an average program needs on a fast processor, and the results I have seen are less than 100 MB/s, except in special cases. Just for comparison, these are bandwidths of popular memory types. PC-100 SDR SDRAM: 800 MBs PC-133 SDR SDRAM: 1,000 MBs PC-800 RDRAM: 1,600 MBS PC-200 DDR SDRAM 1,600 MBs PC-266 DDR SDRAM 2,100 MBs If this is not enough, you can use more than 1 channel of above memory. Joe PS: The reason Intel needs Rambus for P4 is because Intel started work only on one chipset - Rambus based chipsets, and now this chipset is nearing completion, as is P4 CPU. Intel needs Rambus because the Rambus will be the only chipset for P4 when it is released. When Intel management realized that Rambus was a mistake, they started to work on other chipsets, but these chipsets will take a while to complete. Joe