

Spansion to pay royalty fees to Rambus for certain memory technologies






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RE: hurray
By GhandiInstinct on 1/15/2007 8:22:58 PM , Rating: 2
Latency isn't up to par, bandwidth isn't up to par, I'm a high end user and I don't buy new computer hardware monthly, I buy it generationally, I still use RD800 :)

RE: hurray
Rambus is Over priced.

RE: hurray

RE: hurray

RE: hurray

RE: hurray
*COUGHS* Bullshit!
And it matched the FSB.




Also read this:



RE: hurray
By Gatt on 1/15/2007 10:16:29 PM , Rating: 4
You've gotta be kidding me.

You do realize that RD800 chip has worse latency than the worst DDR modules manufactured right? Latency so bad that even the earliest DDR modules can outperform it, despite being clocked hundreds of megahertz lower.

You also realize that XDR would be prohibitively expensive to use, just as RIMM's were.

Nothing made by Rambus is worth buying, I wish they'd gone under following the RIMM disaster.

RE: hurray
By Acanthus on 1/16/07, Rating: 0
RE: hurray
By Magnus Dredd on 1/16/2007 5:34:09 PM , Rating: 2
Perhaps, he doesn't... But I do.

Rambus was really only seriously useful in the very high end where the horribly high latency was less of an issue than a very high bandwidth stream of data. This is useful especially in database applications where a stored proceedure may be able to fit into the L2 or L3 cache of the CPU and latency hits from swapping into and out of the L2/L3 cache aren't performance killers. Instead in this niche market (which also includes scientific computing, and video rendering), you use small amounts of instruction and need to stream the data at the CPU as fast as possible. For this to work the CPU has to have a fair amount of cache memory, like most server processors have.

Their only real major innovation was that their interface was serialized in a similar fashion to PCIe. This means that increased bandwith is simply a matter of adding channels (like PCIe). The problem with this is that when you have 4 channels, you have to add 4 sticks at a time, or 2 dual channel sticks. In the server space this is no big deal. You pack a box with 16 dual channel slots and add 4 sticks at a time at a high cost, but massive throughput. The enterprise has machines physically big enough, and they have enough money to shoulder the massive expense. The problem this led to was that the more sticks per channel you install, the worse your latency gets.

So for the server space they had some interesting ideas. For many (perhaps most) generic server tasks (non-static web serving, multiple service machines, etc) the amount of cache is simply not enough to offset the latency issues with instruction swapping and data dependencies. For home use and gaming, Rambus was a poor match. ESPECIALLY couple with the pentium 4 which had such amazing penalties to branch mispredicts due to the length of the pipeline. Rambus made this weakness in the P4 so much worse.

If you would like, I can pull some numbers showing how terribly latent Rambus was. BTW, DDR2 is available with fairly low latencies, far lower than Rambus has ever offered. 4-4-4-12

oh, heres some Rambus... Latency is 40ns!!!!!!!!!!

RE: hurray
By Magnus Dredd on 1/17/2007 12:54:07 PM , Rating: 2
I'd recommend reading the processor related articles in the Ars Technica paedia:

John Stokes also recently released a book "Inside the Machine"


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