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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: kash johal who wrote (56903)	4/30/1999 6:24:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Respond to of 1589388

<But it will need RAMBUS DRAMS to remotely compete with 0.18 K7's.> One thing about RDRAM is that people are expecting some sort of immediate improvement over SDRAM. That's not exactly going to be the case. RDRAM is like AGP. AGP was considered useless at its introduction, yet now you can't buy a graphics card without AGP anymore. And those graphics cards really do utilize AGP's features. <No one is talking about the fact that Intel could be in serious jeopardy if their Rambus bet bombs this year.> Coppermine's future doesn't depend on RDRAM's success, but Intel is going to use the Camino platform to drive the initial transition to RDRAM. Virtually all of Intel's future chipsets starting from 2001 will be using RDRAM. Heck, AMD can benefit from this initial drive, but of course, AMD can also hedge their bets on different memory technologies. <Apparently RDRAM even if it avilable will be 2x regular memory in cost. At hi-end systems when you start putting 512Mb or 1Gb on a system that's pretty darned expensive!!!!> Well, it's been revealed in Microprocessor Report that the 460GX chipset, the one which supports Merced, will use SDRAM instead of RDRAM. Servers don't need RDRAM yet, because they need to support huge amounts of memory using multiple memory channels anyway. Supporting many gigabytes of memory using multiple RDRAM channels is overkill in bandwidth and expensive. You might as well just stick to multiple SDRAM channels, at least for the near future. But later on down the road, processors will be integrating the memory controller right onto the die. This reduces latency, and as we all know, latency is a bigger problem than bandwidth. The low pin-count of RDRAM makes it perfect for integrated memory controllers. Heck, even Compaq with their upcoming 21364 will integrate four RDRAM controllers onto the Alpha die. And I'll bet AMD is looking into integrated memory controllers for their K8. You should read some of my comments on the RMBS thread. I go into much more detail there. Tenchusatsu