Rambus XDR2 is 5X faster than GDDR, firm claims
mmonnin
Centreville, VA
Memory firm Rambus said it has released XDR2, which is a high bandwidth memory interface technology. The new interface is supposed to have data rates up to 8GHz, 5 times faster than the current GDDR3 which runs at around 1.4GHz on Nvidia's G70.
Source: The InquirerThe interface, the firm said, uses a microthreaded DRAM core with data rates flying along at 8GHz. That, it said, will make it five times faster than the fastest GDDR DRAM products.
Other features of XDR2 include adaptive timing, that compensates for voltage and temperature variations, while the microthreading will help minimise power consumption, Rambus said
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Comments
8Ghz or 8Mhz??
~Cyrix
Their XDR2 spec calls for multiple, independently-addressed blocks on a single DIMM/bank/whatever. Instead of one huge block as we would see on DDR/DDR2/anymemorypriortoxdr2. XDR is quad-rate, that is 200MHz is pumped 4x for "800MHz" (Again, stupid marketing). If they introduced 10 independently-addressed blocks at 200MHz, THEN they would have 8GHz memory, but I have a really hard time believing RAMBUS (****ing fraudsters) has 8GHz memory.
They surely twist out number to come to that conclusion, like they always did and like a bunch of compagny in many market also did a couple of times... But... That's marketing ! (and that's s*cks)
*Love is in the air* :Rocker:
Marketing foolishness and questionable corporate practices aside, they have a decent product. PlayStation3 will use this memory for the Cell SPU caches so obviously someone thinks it's good for something. The polythreaded operation will help in the graphics and multiprocessor departments from the insane bandwidth. PlayStation2 only had 32MB of RDRAM and is able to compete with the Xbox so they must have been doing something right. My old 1.8GHz Pentium 4 Northwood on the i850 chipset did pretty well right up until 800MHz bus processors became available.
If you want to nail some questionable marketing, we can start there. Intel's chips weren't quad-pumped after they stopped using RDRAM so they should have gone back to 100MHz (400MHz), 133 MHz (533MHz), and 200MHz (800MHz) if they wanted to be honest. Why would marketing want to be honest?
-drasnor