The last time we heard about Rambus XDR memory being used on a wide scale was with Sony's PlayStation 3. Nevertheless, senior vice president Sharon Holt at Rambus Licensing and Marketing believes that "today's consumer electronics require both high performance and superior power efficiency." Elpida Memory in particular has shown itself to be the top supplier of XDR RAM and continues to specialize in developing high-performance, low-power XDR products.

Today, the Japanese company introduced the industry's first 1-Gigabit XDR DRAM based on an x32-bit configuration.  The memory features a proprietary 65nm CMOS process designed to run at frequencies up to 7.2GHz at just 1.5v, which is faster and more efficient than any GDDR5 memory to date.  It provides a one-chip solution that, compared with two x16-bit configuration 512 Megabit XDR DRAMs, consumes 35-40% less power and requires less space.

Additionally, the memory is capable of an octal data rate and provides a data transfer rate of 28.8GB/s with a single device, making it an ideal choice for a variety of high-bandwidth applications such as entertainment devices with full-HD capabilities.  More specifically, the data width is x4, x8, x16, and x32 bits programmable which is capable of delivering several times the peak bandwidth of industry-standard DDR2-800 memory devices.

Sample shipments of the new XDR have already started and mass production is scheduled to begin this April. Furthermore, Elpida's press release was published on January 20th and can be found here.