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"Richard Hopkins" <richh@dsl.nospam.com> wrote in message
news:4251320b$0$295$cc9e4d1f@news-text.dial.pipex.com...
>
> "aether" wrote in message...
> > That's what I was hoping wasn't the case.
>
> Them's the breaks.
>
> > It's a shame RDRAM didn't catch wind.
>
> No, it's far better for both the PC industry and computer owners that it
> died on its arse. Unfortunate for you and the other Rambus PC owners
maybe,
> but them's the breaks.
>
> > I suppose it was before it's time.
>
> Not remotely. It was a somewhat flawed technology driven by a greedy,
> notoriously litigious intellectual property firm. Intel made a major
mistake
> in adopting it, and backtracked as soon as their agreement with Rambus
Inc.
> allowed them to.
The proof is in the pudding. Quad rambus will be used in game consoles,
because it is much faster than DDR, DDR2, or any other super-duper-matched
pair-low-latency DDR (that PC enthusiasts shell out premium bucks for, to
squeeze out an extra smidgen of performance), when it comes to streaming
large amounts of data.
In January of 2001, the price of rambus was ~ the same as DDR, per megabyte.
If you wanted real memory performance, rambus would always win over DDR (at
the time, there was no DDR system that could dome within a factor of 3 of
rambus for my own particular benchmarks). But the enthusiast tide turned,
and DDR prices eventually followed the laws of economics. Manufacturing
prices eventually fall with electronics, the more an item becomes commodity.
Four years have passed, and the fastest AMD DDR system I was able to afford
is 2.15 times faster -- for my memory-intensive programs -- than the 1.4 GHz
P4 rambus system I put together in 2001. I have absolutely no doubt that
quad rambus, with the new fast access times, would give me a much better
performance boost.
I've had two rambus and three DDR systems. The latter are much quirkier for
memory tuning. I simply put together my asus rambus system (2nd P4) with
inexpensive vanilla memory, overclocked 10%, and have been running it for
3.5 years. I've had to futz and futz with the DDR systems to get any
increment.
While I can appreciate that people were irritated by the rambus company
litigiousness, I can also appreciate that people seemed rather blind to how
common this sort of shenanigan is in the corporate world, especially when a
company's stock values begin to tumble.
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