Los Altos (CA) – Driven by Sony’s  Playstation 3, Rambus said that memory manufacturers have shipped more than 25 million memory devices based on the firm’s XDR technology.

Based on current estimates that Sony has sold about 5.5 million PS3s to date and the fact that the console uses four 512 Mbit XDR devices suggests that about 22 million XDR units have made their way into this product. Samsung and Elpida are the main XDR memory suppliers for the PS3.

Rambus did not provide further specific products, which are using XDR devices today, but mentioned that the technology “ideally suited for graphics processing, consumer electronics, network and server applications, as well as a new generation of compute platforms driven by multi-core processors.”

While we know that especially Cell-processor based server and workstation systems integrate XDR memory, it is unclear which role the memory will play in other high-performance computing applications such as graphics and stream processing. The fact that Rambus is the only technology source and indications that AMD and Nvidia are jumping from GDDR3 to GDDR4 and GDDR5, suggests that Rambus will have a tough time getting the technology adopted by this market segment. iSuppli analyst Nam Kim, however, believes that XDR “could lend itself to future graphics-intensive applications such as HDTV.”

Currently available XDR devices run with up to 4 GHz, providing a peak memory bandwidth of 8.0 GB/s. Rambus said that XDR will scale to 8.0 GHz and 16 GB/s bandwidth.

extensibly drug resistant devices

Jun 11, 2007 16:08     

XDR might not be the best name to use these days in light of the latest tuberculosis scare.
Bob report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Poor Rambus

Jun 11, 2007 16:42     

Rambus RAM/RIMMs have always been exceedingly expensive, and their time to take hold of the market was back when SDRAM was still in standard use; and the competition was on between them and the DDR and GDDR standard. DDR won out cause they kept their prices significantly lower, and thus more competitive. Plus the integration of RAMBUS RIMMS was limited solely to Intel Chipsets and Processors. While at the same time AMD had released it's Thunderbird line and soon after XP lines which operated using DDR. Intel seemed to offer DDR standards too soon after. It's not surprising the that cheaper standard won, and I feel sorry for the people who still use the old Rambus 400 mhz computers. I still have people bring those computers in for upgrading the memory. Man that stuff is pricey, still.

Jhouserok report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

400 MHz Rambus computers? They started with the i82...

Jun 12, 2007 01:18     

400 MHz Rambus computers? They started with the i820, which ran at 133 MHz bus, so no one has a 400 MHz Pentium III running on a Rambus platform. I still use them on an i840 based platform, because the motherboards are so cheap on eBay brand new and so are the processors. The memory is a killer though, particularly PC800-40. The PC800-45 is almost the same speed, but it's a little bit slower (which no one tells you, they tell you that you can't take advantage of the speed). It gets really hot too. The main reason Rambus never caught on was they tied it to the Pentium III which couldn't use the bandwidth very well, and of course the price. It was great for the Pentium 4, but everyone hated the company by then, and it had a bad name. So, it died, but the performance when it died was still better than DDR.

RA report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Rambus is really unlucky.

Jun 12, 2007 02:19     

After failling in the PC business Rambus finally managed to get their product in a mainstream console, only to have the console in question (PS3) met with dismal sales. If you look at the VGcharts for last week PS3 lost 1 to 5 to the wii and 1 to 3 to the XB360, and even managed to sell less in the US than the aging Gameboy advance (yes, the old advance, not the DS). Somebody put a curse on rambus...

vanhaesendonck report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Not 400MHz CPU...

Jun 13, 2007 12:00     

By 400MHz rambus computer they guy meant the RAM was at 400, not the P3. As I recall, RDRAM went higher. At work I loathe the P4 1.7 with 800MHz RDRAM. So utterly useless.
pwnartist report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

ps2 uses rambus

Jun 14, 2007 00:22     

I believe a few of those still get sold.
roadhog report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

RD-RAM was always JUNK

Jun 14, 2007 14:27     

RAMBUS failed by a number of reasons. 1 - intel shoved it down everyones throats. 2 - It was expensive 3 - It offered no better performance 4 - It was very hot 5 - It has very high Latency, which pretty much kills the higher-clock rate. RD-RAM was made for the new Pentium4 CPUs which again, ran at HIGH clock rates, but did little actual computations. It also caused the whole memory market to go wacky as companies switched to RD-RAM that nobody wanted to buy and created a shortage of SD-RAM that was needed for P3 and AMD systems. An AMD 1.2Ghz CPU with SD-RAM was faster than a P4-1.8Ghz with its x4 cost RAM! ($800 = 512mb rather than $200 for SDR) Then Intel quickly made the hybrid 820board which had a chip to convert SDR-RAM modules to talk to the RD-RAM north bridge... it blew chunks. RD-RAM... it deserved to die.

barlog report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

XDR int he PS3

Jun 14, 2007 18:14     

The Cellprocessor uses In-order programming. In what on software level already everything has to be prepared to run as the CELL chip does. ( unlike a generic cpu that uses part of its chip to re-order the commands on assembler level ). Pro's are more speed because no need to re-order but the code has to be pre-compiled for the processor and. More important the latencies have to be low and bandwidth as high as possible. The only memory that can offer that at the moment is.. XDR! The Cell processor and XDR are thus bound together!

Masticina Akicta report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

Wrong calcule

Jun 23, 2007 12:11     

PS3 does not use 4x 512 XDR, but 1x 256
Antoine report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

@ antoine =>Mbit vs Mbyte

Oct 04, 2007 10:58     

512 mbit = 64 Mbyte (given an 8-bit byte) SO.... 4 x 512 Mbit = 2048 Mbit =256Mbyte of RAM.
spammage report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0