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Rambus to reassure at
Comdex
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
November 13, 1998, 5:25 p.m. PT
comdex People drawn to Rambus computer memory, the
heir-apparent memory technology standard, will be able
to get an eyeful at Comdex next week.
Rambus, which designs a high-speed memory system that
other manufacturers license for the basis of their own products,
will be showing its memory chips from several manufacturers
and modules from memory giant Kingston, said Sibodh
Toprani, vice president of Rambus' logic division.
"We're trying to reassure PC [manufacturers] that we're getting
to the volumes they want," Toproni said.
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Rambus' Direct RDRAM technology enables peak speeds of
1.6GB/sec. That's twice as fast as the 800MB/sec peak speed
of today's fastest memory technology, synchronous DRAM
(SDRAM), Toprani said. In addition, because of the way
Rambus memory chips (RDRAMs) are designed, the Rambus
design comes closer to reaching that peak performance in
practice.
The company has licensed its
designs to the top 14 or 15
memory manufacturers, and
memory chips from Toshiba,
Samsung, LG Semiconductor,
Fujitsu, and NEC will be on
display. Kingston, which
assembles those RDRAM chips
into modules called RIMMs, also
will have products on display,
said Kingston's Richard Kanadjian.
Also at the Rambus' Comdex area will be Hewlett-Packard,
which manufactures equipment to test RDRAM, and Molex,
which manufactures the computer slots that memory plugs
into.
Computers using RDRAM are expected in the first half of 1999,
Toprani said.
RDRAM, available only in limited quantities for engineers,
currently costs twice as much as SDRAM. Once it begins
shipping in quantity, Rambus hopes it will cost only 10 percent
more. Eventually, when SDRAM starts disappearing from
circulation in 2000 or 2001, its price will rise to meet
RDRAM's, Toprani predicted.
Intel and invested $500 million in DRAM manufacturer and
Rambus licensee Micron Technology in order to support
Micron's RDRAM manufacturing efforts.
Even though RDRAM has bigger bandwidth than SDRAM, it
still suffers from a key problem common to all DRAM designs:
latency.
Latency is the amount of time a processor spends waiting after
requesting information be retrieved from memory. Today's
processors, running at about 500 MHz, can execute an
instruction every 2 billionths of a second, but the DRAM itself
forces a wait of at least 40 billionths of a second, Toprani said.
That means that the processor is forced to do the electronic
equivalent of twiddling its thumbs--while it could have been
processing 20 or more instructions.
On top of that, is the wait imposed by the system--such as
Direct RDRAM--that transfers that information. Early Direct
RDRAM technology had high latency, but the modern design is
about 10 billionths of a second faster than any other
technology, shipping or planned, Toprani said.
The current solution to latency is to use a special high-speed
memory called a cache that can respond faster to the
processor's demands. Cache sizes have been getting larger
and cache speeds have been getting faster to keep ever-swifter
processors from being dragged down too far by sluggish
memory.
Related news stories
• Rambus shines in Intel-Micron deal October 16, 1998
• Intel to invest in Micron October 16, 1998
• Rambus rides earnings fallout October 16, 1998
• Rambus reports strong quarter October 15, 1998
• Chip slide may have hit bottom August 7, 1998
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