The Rambus
technology addresses one of the key problems in speeding
up computer systems: Memory chips operate significantly
slower than microprocessors. That means the faster
microprocessors are often waiting to read or write data
to and from the memory chip, and speeding up the
microprocessor only goes so far in improving overall
system performance.
What Rambus has
developed is a protocol for memory and processor chips
to send data between each other at very fast speeds.
Rambus licenses the technology to chip- and
memory-makers that built it inside the integrated
circuits in their own products.
Rambus' Direct RDRAM
technology enables peak speeds of 1.6GB/sec. That's
twice as fast as the 800MB/sec peak speed of today's
fastest memory technology, synchronous DRAM (SDRAM). In
addition, because of the way Rambus memory chips (RDRAMs)
are designed, the Rambus design comes closer to reaching
that peak performance in practice.
Why is the industry moving from today's
DRAM technology to RDRAM? Constrained by the laws of
physics, current DRAM just can't run much faster or send
data through a pipeline that's much wider.
RDRAM, on the other hand, runs eight
times faster than current high-speed DRAM by imposing
tight constraints on memory connection hardware. |