Rambus Offers First DRAM to Break 1 GHz

New chip is meant for graphics systems, video consoles, and HDTV.

George A. Chidi Jr., IDG News Service

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Rambus said the chip will be marketed for "leading-edge applications" such as communications and graphics systems, along with consumer products such as high-definition television and video game consoles. The chip is also designed to increase performance speed for high-end processors such as the upcoming Pentium 4, formerly dubbed the Willamette chip.

Memory throughput speeds can become a bottleneck for fast processors, because the processor chips spend more time waiting for data from memory chips than processing that data.

The 1.066-GHz Rambus DRAM, or RDRAM, can move memory to a processor chip a third faster than the 800-MHz chip Rambus unveiled in June, the company said in the announcement. The chip can transfer data twice per processor clock cycle, setting maximum throughput at 2.1 GHz.

RDRAM competes with double data rate synchronous DRAM, or DDR SDRAM, a less expensive kind of memory chip that also transfers data twice per cycle. SDRAM's transfer rate is 133 MHz. Intel announced recently that it would support both Rambus and SDRAM memory for the Pentium 4, a change from its support of Rambus memory solely.

Rambus doesn't produce chips itself--it licenses the designs to memory chip manufacturers. No specific date of commercial availability or cost was mentioned. DRAM chips in general and RDRAM chips in particular have been in short supply recently.

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