Published in Cloud

Rambus in talks with GPU makers

by on26 June 2008

Image

Doesn’t want to talk about details


At an
event earlier today in Taiwan, Rambus talked a lot about the bandwidth needs of both graphics cards and consoles and it seems like the company is very hopeful about a bright future in this market segment.

One of the people we talked to admitted that Rambus was talking to the various GPU manufacturers and considering that Nvidia already has some experience working with Rambus on the PS3 graphics solution, it’s not too far fetched that the company could be considering a Rambus solution in the future.

Rambus’ XDR technology offers some advantages over GDDR, such as easier PCB tracing and high bandwidth, two things that should be interesting for companies making graphics cards. On top of this, Rambus is working on what they’re calling the Terabyte bandwidth initiative, which should allow for some very fast memory in the future. The demo board didn’t look like much and even today’s fastest XDR memory only runs at 500MHz, which is slow even compared to GDDR5 at 900MHz.

But as GDDR5 has a four times internal multiplier, XDR has an eight times multiplier and the Terabyte bandwidth initiative is going after a 32 times multiplier. That means that if this memory would be clocked at 500MHz when it arrives, it would offer 1.6TB/s in bandwidth, although it’s likely that first generation memory of this type won’t come in at much more than 333MHz.

This could lead to some interesting memory solutions for graphics cards in the future, but time will tell if this is a path that the GPU makers are willing to go down.

Last modified on 27 June 2008
Rate this item
(0 votes)