Rambus DRAM
<storage> A high bandwidth DRAM, designed by Rambus, Inc. of Mountain
View, CA.
RDRAM is used mainly for video accelerators, and also in the Ultra 64 from
Nintendo. It offers sustained transfer rates of around 1000 Mbps, compared to
200 Mbps for ordinary DRAM. Although it cannot be used as a direct replacement
for existing memory, it is likely that it will replace DRAM and SDRAM as the
main memory system in personal computers as the bus speeds required by these
machines increase. SDRAM can operate up to around 100MHz, but RDRAM has been
demonstrated by the manufacturers running at 600MHz.
The memory is also only 8 or 9 bits wide, so the bandwidth would increase
enormously if it were used in parallel to give 32 or 64-bit memory.
(1996-12-13)
Nearby terms:
RAISE « RAL « RAM « Rambus DRAM » Rambus,
Inc. » RAMDAC » RAM disk
|
