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To: Scumbria who wrote (82030)	5/29/1999 8:52:00 PM
From: grok	Respond to of 186894

Re: <I challenge the thread to come up with an explanation of this bizarre comment from the article: "...Using integrated RDRAM in the low-cost PC can lower overall memory costs, since it takes less memory to deliver adequate performance."> Seems like he's talking about the granularity issue: if you don't need much memory then you can't get decent bandwidth with sdram since it isn't wide enough. Let's say you have a small PC with 16MB of dram which amounts to two 64Mbit chips. This could be two drdram chips with 1.6GB/s bandwidth or two x16 PC100 sdrams with 400MB/s. However, maybe it could be two x32 PC133 sdrams with 1GB/s bandwidth which is pretty close. Or ddrdrams which would be faster than rambus. The Rambus solution saves pins but this may or may not be a killer issue depending on how many pins you actually need total. Of course there's more to cost than just pins. On the processor you've got royalties to rambus and the die size for the rac (Rambus ASIC Controller) which is non-trivial. You've got to pay more for the drams too due to royalties and die size increase which is something like 12%. It seemed very clear a few years ago when the rambus vision was laid out and it seemed like the dram industry was incapable of even doing 100MHz as a standard. But drdram has had some slips and PC133 is coming on and probably even ddr. Of course, don't forget the fact that almost everyone in the dram business hates rambus. So what's it all mean? Beats me.