To: KM who wrote (19190 ) 4/23/1999 7:18:00 PM From: Tenchusatsu Read Replies (1) | Respond to
RMBS investors (current and potential),sharkyextreme.com Although caches significantly improve the system performance the traditional RAM increasingly lags behind CPU performance. As long as the CPU is not idle while waiting for data everyone is happy. But CPUs will soon surpass the gigahertz clock rate and significant improvements in RAM are needed. From a technical perspective the initial implementations of Rambus have a peak bandwidth that's 200% better than PC100 and an effective bandwidth of up to 300% better. You can draw your own conclusions about performance differences. In addition, Rambus requires about 25% of the pins and interconnect wires from the chipset to the memory, so if you could use the same number of pins already in use by SDRAM you could have 4x the performance over the first Direct Rambus implementations. Now that Intel has somewhat embraced the PC-133 option in light of the recent RDRAM delays, How will average consumers see a performance benefit from SDRAM that's clocked at a higher speed than they're used to? ) I cannot comment in Intel's plans. But, in general, the PC133 SDRAM offers a 33% improvement in bandwidth over PC100. In the transition from PC66 to PC100 it is generally acknowledged that the performance improvement was around 5% (for a 50% increase in memory performance.) So one can extrapolate that the system level performance improvement due to PC133 will probably be in the 3% range. This highlights that SDRAM is also reaching the point of diminishing returns and a significant change is needed. What about the competition then? Does DDR SDRAM, HSDRAM, or ESDRAM show a degree of performance that equals or approaches the specifications for RDRAM? With Intel pushing forward in one direction with RDRAM, and competitive designs emerging from semiconductor manufacturers around the globe, is the industry headed for a show down or an anti-climax? ) Every new memory proposal has certain tradeoffs of cost, performance and availability. Rambus is ready for the market this year. Where do the others stand? Time to market is everything in this business.
