Those of you that have believed reports that consign RAMBUS to the Pet Cemetery have written the company off prematurely. Not only was RAMBUS a 'Gold Sponsor' (that means they're in bed with Intel) at this year's IDF but did anyone notice their stock soar earlier this week (up over 50%!)? There were many explainations on the show floor for the sharp rise in RAMBUS' stock. The most prevalent being due to Intel's announcements that the Willamette and Tehama platforms will only run with RDRAM. "Timna" will initially ship with SDRAM until volume production of RDRAM is available and even though it is designed with Rambus technology SDRAM will be still be an option as it utilizes the MTH (memory translator hub). Thus RDRAM is for real and if you intend on using an Intel platform in late 2000 and 2001 you're going to wind up using RDRAM (unless you go with "Foster" and DDR RAM) not because it's faster, more expensive, and/or sounds nice but because Intel says so. We did hear rumblings of PC-133 "interim" solutions (Solano etc…) but it's clear now that newly emerging technology called RDRAM will be edging its way into the mainstream, corporate and gaming systems. It won't stop there either. RDRAM-based mobile PCs "are not far off", said one Intel contact. There's clearly some way to go in terms of the price. At around $8 per MB a slash in price is in order. As it stands today, many end users have a hard time justifying the x3 price necessary to fill RIMMs instead of DIMMs. Several RAMBUS representatives told Sharky Extreme that they expect full-fledged RDRAM-based gaming PCs to be on sale from the likes of Dell, Gateway and Compaq by the second half of 2000 and priced more reasonably at approximately $2000.
Further good news for RAMBUS comes in the form of the soon to be released Sony Playstation 2 (due out in a few weeks in Japan), which will be shipping with PC 600 RDRAM.
There will be two devices per console, one device per channel, placed directly on the board for what is called a "short channel" whis supposedly allows the memory to operate at faster speed.
With an estimated two million units due to be sold within the first few months, there certainly won't be any room for "teething" problems. SEGA's Dreamcast being delayed due to yield problems with the PowerVR graphics chip in 1998 was one thing but with Sony at the helm for the Playstation 2, I doubt they'll be as forgiving should any delays occur.
Looking forward, we were told that by the end of Q1, at least four major memory suppliers will begin shipping RDRAM and that by Q2 the number will rise to six. Today's RDRAM is currently capable of 800MB/sec per pin. We were told that by the end of this year this would be increased two-fold up to 1.6GB/sec per pin. "The current 1.6Gigabyte bandwidth per module will be upped to 6.4Gigabytes per module by 2001", said one source.
With NVIDIA's GeForce 256 ruling the 3D waves for four months now, there's been a bit of a lull in the 3D graphics industry as of late. We're still awaiting that "spring refresh" from NVIDIA (NV15), 3dfx' re-emergence with the VSA-100, Matrox' next product, ATI's Rage 6c and S3's Savage 2000+. Although information on the aforementioned chip sets is under lock and key (we're NDA'd upside our heads) what tidbits that we did pick up at IDF, we figured we'd share: