Samsung gura Rambus memorije nove generacije u proizvodnju

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Seoul - Samsung started mass production of what the company claims is the world's fastest memory. Rambus, developer of the technology, Samsung position "XDR DRAM" initially as high-bandwidth memory for multimedia applications and hope the technology will trickle down into the PC segment by 2006.

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.

"XDR technology has tremendous potential to become a leading memory solution for today's highest-performance multimedia applications and we're quite enthusiastic about its prospects," said Mueez Deen, marketing director, graphics memory, Samsung Semiconductor.

The introduction of XDR however is reminiscent of RDRAM around 2000/2001. The technology provided significantly more speed than DDR and was promoted by industry heavyweights such as Samsung and Intel. But in the end, RDRAM failed to capture a substantial share of the PC market due to high memory prices and a wave of patent infringement lawsuits Rambus threw at virtually every memory manufacturer.

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.

"Back in 2000, there were applications that did not make use of RDRAM's bandwidth. Certain applications were also very price sensitive in regards to memory," Ching said.

Instead of repeating a strategy that covers every computing segment, the company now selects only devices that will see an immediate benefit from the performance and justify the premium. Initially chosen segments are advanced HDTVs and consumer electronics with the next Sony Playstation being believed to be one of the first devices to take advantage of XDR.

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.

Besides Samsung, also Elpida, Sony and Toshiba announced support for the memory platform.

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