INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (IP) firm
Rambus bit the bullet last week and also tipped up at Bert McComas' Platform
2001 conference, indicating we don't know what, but it's pretty sure they
wouldn't have been there this time last year.
Billy Garrett, manager of strategic
marketing at the Los Altos firm, outlined the RIMM module roadmap for the
next year - a year which still sees Rambus memory at the high performance
end of the Pentium 4 desktop.
Although many feel that Intel's
support for Rambus is wavering more than a little, support for RIMMs at
that level is still solid on its roadmap, with mid-range P4 offerings, however,
filled with the DDR 845 Brookdale chipset.
Although circumstances prevented
us attending Platform 2001, we've got hold of the Rambus roadmap, worth
seeing particularly because Intel's "Tulloch" chipset is set to take advantage
of future directions from the litigation-battered outfit.
Future RIMMs will include 1066MHz
modules in 2002, and 1200MHz in 2005, while 32-bit and 64-bit offerings
are on the roadmap.
RMBS' goal is still to drive
prices down at all layers, at the same time as it pushes technology. It
hopes to capture the Pentium 4 wave by doing so, although royalty payments
mean DDR price parity may always be a few points away. Several of the bigger
Taiwanese manufacturers already have working four layer mobos using the
850 chipset, including Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Acer and Abit.
One slide claims that Rambus
memory offers a balanced answer to Pentium 4 systems, with front side bus
and memory subsystem optimised at 3.2GB/s.
There will be a 9GB/s module
by 2005, while Rambus designs fill the gap by jumping to 1200MHz and then
going "wider" to 64-bits. We'll see a 64-bit RIMM 9600 probably sometime
in 2002. Going "wider" will increase performance by four times, Rambus claims,
while still using the same form factor or physical size. However, the 32-bit
modules appear to have 232 pins, while the 64-bit RIMMs will have 326 pins.
Rambus claims that DDR-2 needs
to double the data path and the frequency, with a minimum of eight devices
to achieve 6.4GB/s, while its own approach using 32- and 64-bit RIMMs will
give ECC memory in all applications, using two or four RDRAM devices compared
to a minimum of 9/18 chips for DDR-2.
Other plans? Well, we believe
Rambus will roll these out when it unveils its Yellowstone technology at
its own developer conference on the 20th of September next.
