Let's talk about XDR

Huge bandwidths, same power consumption, prices that contribute to a 700 dollar price tag on the PS3?

Is this the future of RAM? Will clock speeds become irrelevant when a memory module can fill and then transmit all of its memory in less than a tenth of a second?

 

Wrong section.
Thread moved.
EDIT : Now to the subject.
The XDR-RAM is a Quad-rate (opposed to Double-rate) memory.Meaning 4 transfers for each clock.It is supposed to have a low latency too.And on PS3 it has the extremely high 3200MHz (800MHz x 4 ) effective Rate.And the clock of the CELL processor and the effective clock of the memory is the same so it brings some architectural/performance benefits.
The main problem is that the XDR is made by Rambus, a fabless, intellectual property memory firm.
There are two main incomes for this company are :
1 - Licensing Intellectual property for memory technology.
2 - To sue other companies over such properties and gain cash.
(See it's article on the Wikipedia to get the idea).
Also AFAIK there are no benchmarks for the XDR-versus-GDDR3/DDR3 family to see what they really bring (DDR3 has Quad-Data Rate too, but at the price of the raised latencies - the current DDR3 memories are @ 7-7-7-20 ).
The other fact about Rambus is the well-known RD-RAM scandal.It reached high memory clocks in comparison to DDR/SD-RAM but had very big memory latencies (Say 45ns to 6ns).And on top of that was extremely pricey, currently it's much more economical to buy a new mobo and memories rather than upgrading RD-RAM equipped PCs.
I think this will do

 

WOW...that is incredible!

 

I'm pretty sure DDR3 still transfers 2 bits per cycle, not 4 like XDR. I hate citing wiki, but I'm not feeling up to finding a better reference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3

 

If it is better, hopefully it will be better than the last iteration of Rambus. That stuff didn't do so well.

 

[QUOTE = Wikipedia]Module name Bus clock Chip type Peak transfer rate
PC3-6400 400 MHz DDR3-800 6.40 GB/s
PC3-8500 533 MHz DDR3-1066 8.53 GB/s
PC3-10600 667 MHz DDR3-1333 10.67 GB/s[2]
PC3-12800 800 MHz DDR3-1600 12.80 GB/s[/QUOTE]
Oh, you are right.
Sorry

 

I thought the same thing until I double checked for another post. I think they'll probably actually call it QDR when the time comes, no marketing department would pass up that opportunity.