Samsung ships 512 Mbit XDR chips

[Acert93]

Good news for us graphics junkies:

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050125_112414.html

Samsung has begun mass production of 512 Mbit Rambus' XDR memory chips. The devices transfer data at eight bits per clock cycle yielding 8GBps, ten times faster than 400MHz DDR SDRAM. They also incorporate Rambus' Differential Rambus Signal Level (DRSL) technology, Samsung said.

Tom's source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/25/samsung_ships_xdr/

There is mention that this may go into the PS3, but with the huge bandwidth it offers hopefully we will see this, or competing tech, on the PC and maybe other consoles as well.

 

[Xmas]

Samsung has begun mass production of 256Mb Rambus' XDR memory chips.

Samsung has begun mass production of 512 Mbit Rambus' XDR memory chips.

Duh...



So targetting 256MiB, you could either reach up to 64GB/s using eight 256Mib devices, or up to 51,2GB/s using four 512Mib devices. Not that bad, but at what cost?

 

[mczak]

Samsung has begun mass production of 256Mb Rambus' XDR memory chips.

Samsung has begun mass production of 512 Mbit Rambus' XDR memory chips.

Duh...

Well, even the register headline says "shipping 512Mbit chips" whereas the text says "mass production of 256MBit chips" (no word about when they are actually shipping) and clearly says 512Mbit chips will be produced later...
So we have a completely bogus headline, and toms manages to make it worse by not only adapting the bogus headline, but also by getting the summary wrong

 

[Acert93]

Samsung's production currently consists of 256 Mbit XDR DRAM (eXtreme Data Rate) that will target for now multimedia applications such as Sony's Cell processor that will support the technology. The transfer speed of the XDR memory module is rated at 8 GByte per second - about ten times the speed of DDR 400 and five times the speed of PC800 RDRAM. During the first half of the year, Samsung plans to increase the capacity to 512 Mbit and boost the bandwidth to 12.8 GByte per second.

Some serious performance there.

This time, Rambus takes a step at a time to get it right and establish XDR as a possible high-end alternative to DDR-based memory. "We are carefully targeting applications that can use the bandwidth of XDR," said Michael Ching, product marketing manager at Rambus. Pricing of XDR modules has not been announced yet, but industry sources indicate that the additional performance of the technology will command a "visible" premium over current GDDR3 memory - just as RDRAM did over SDRAM.

Over the next two years, Rambus intends to scale XDR from currently 2.4 GHz in steps of 800 MHz up to 8 GHz. Ching believes XDR could also become an option for performance PC and graphic cards until 2006. While current 256-bit graphics processor with 1.6 GHz GDDR3 memory can offer a bandwidth of 50 GByte per second, the same processor provides 256 GByte per second with XDR, according to Ching.

From: http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050125_170734.html

This stuff is sounding really expensive. I wonder how far it will outpace GDDR3/GDDR4 by Spring of 2006 (my gestimated launch date of the PS3)?

CELL, nVidia GPU to compete with R500, BR, extremely high speed Rambus XDR, possibly a HDD... PS3 is going to have some excellent technology but it also looks like it could be very very expensive.

I would like to see what Sony would do if MS put 512MB of fast (~50GB/s) GDDR3/4 RAM into the Xenon. Obviously I want to see a lot of memory in the new consoles, but that XDR RAM wont be cheap. Oh well, I would be willing to pay a little more early on for a better console. And after 2 or 3 years it wont really matter because the price will drop a lot anyhow.

 

[AlNom]

While current 256-bit graphics processor with 1.6 GHz GDDR3 memory can offer a bandwidth of 50 GByte per second

Saaaay whaaaat???? I want....pretty please.

And after 2 or 3 years it wont really matter because the price will drop a lot anyhow.

In order to turn a profit (or to try and break even in the totality of xbox2's life), MS would have to continue selling the console at a relatively constant price while said components become cheaper.

hm.....

 

[Cryect]

Hmmm, so what are the other planned uses for this memory besides the PS3?

High speed networking equipment?

 

[rwolf]

Isn't the R520 suppose to have a new snazzy memory interface?

 

[Xmas]

Yes, but GDDR4.

 

[Wunderchu]

http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.aspx?i=23725