Intel Developer Forum Spring 2003 - Technology Showcase

Rambus - Not much on the Desktop Side

As usual Rambus was a Gold Sponsor of the Intel Developer Forum, and with Intel pushing only their dual channel DDR platform designs it's not a surprise that the majority of what we saw at Rambus wasn't related to desktop PC chipsets:

Consumer and network applications were prime targets for RDRAM's high bandwidth and extremely granular architecture, which we continued to see at the Technology Showcase.

Device such as this Digital Light Projector pictured above, are applications for RDRAM that you normally wouldn't think of.

Rambus did have an ABIT motherboard based on SiS' R658 dual channel RDRAM solution up and running. This particular board supports RDRAM with speeds of up to 1200MHz, which is quite impressive but it's a shame that Intel won't be using the technology anytime soon.

What's even more interesting is the R659 chipset, a quad-channel RDRAM chipset due out by the end of this year from SiS. The beauty of the R659 is that you can use four channels of cheap PC800 RDRAM and still obtain the same 6.4GB/s of memory bandwidth that Intel's dual channel DDR400 865/875 platforms will offer, but with much easier board layout. Unfortunately without Intel's backing, it's unlikely that quad-channel RDRAM will ever take off with the Pentium 4 - not unless SiS is hugely successful with the R659.