Intel Developer Forum Spring 2002 - Day 2

Rambus at PC1200 speeds

A gold-sponsor at all IDF conferences, Rambus was present demonstrating a couple of interesting things.

With Intel moving to the 533MHz FSB Rambus will obviously be offering PC1066 RDRAM to pair up with the faster bus frequency but the engineers at Rambus went one step further to show the potential of the technology by overclocking regular PC800 RDRAM RIMMs to PC1200 speeds.

This was done with overclocking the FSB on their i850 test platform as well to 150MHz, effectively giving the Pentium 4 a 600MHz FSB. Needless to say that the performance improvement was impressive, and the numbers they were showing were around 30% higher than what we'd expect from a PC800/100MHz FSB system at almost an equivalent clock.