Rambus

Rambus

Following our visit to the Platform Conference, we paid a visit to Rambus. After copious amounts of cursing at Yahoo's thoroughly worthless directions, we arrived at the Rambus office only slightly off schedule. We sat down with Steven Woo and Brian Smith for a run through on what Rambus has planned for the next couple of years; from what we gather, the plan is not to sue the industry into the ground.

Naming

The simplest of the new happenings at Rambus is the way they name their products. Most would agree that the current nomenclature tends to be misleading. Tags of PC800 and the like tend to lead people astray. Instead of basing the name off of the memory speed (in the case of PC800 = 400MHz x 2) the new names will be based on the end bandwidth. So instead of PC800 we will now see RIMM1600, the 1600 representing 1.6GB of memory bandwidth. This makes for less confusion, and in the end separates itself from DDR nomenclature. Thereby forcing people to learn what the various numbers mean, and if not Rambus will end up with the higher number, sucking in that particular crowd of people.

Roadmap

From 1600MB/sec to 9600MB/sec

A quick overview of the roadmap for Rambus shows some rather interesting technology put to use for these future GHz-heavy processors. As the years go by, Rambus proposes to keep the same memory for quite a while. Slight modifications will be done to the RAM, but most of the work will be done to the memory controllers. The benefit of the Rambus method is seen in the minimal amount of retooling involved for manufacturers, and the reusability of old hardware in newer systems. The RDRAM interface proposes to get faster while still maintaining a 16-bit datapath. The main goal will be to widen the datapath of RIMM modules from 16-bits to 32-bits, and eventually 64-bits by using multiple channels of RDRAMs on each RIMM module.

Wider is better

Rambus' roadmap takes us from present day to the year 2005. Along the way, bandwidth will increase from 1.6 GB to 9.6 GB, with multiple stages along the way (i.e. RIMM4200, RIMM6400, RIMM8500). For the near future (2002), Rambus will unveil the 1066 spec bringing with it 32-bit memory architecture, and the products RIMM2100 (16-bit), RIMM4200.

The roadmap through 2005