Anyone ever heard of quadband memory? A company called Kentron http://www.kentrontech.com developed it. It uses standard DDR sdram with a small controller for each 2 chips that shifts the signal 90 degrees for the second chip. Anyways, you get 2x the bandwidth off of the same DDR sdram we use today. Its completly pin compatible and backward compatible with 184 pin ddr, unlike DDR2 that will be 240 pins and have much higher latency. All you need is a memory controller that supports QBM and then you can use either standard DDR or QBM for 2x the bandwidth. QBM modules are only supposed to cost like $15 more.
I guess some of Via's chipsets already support this but I was wondering why no one else has jumped on it considering that it's actually been around a little while, is fully backward compatible, retains low latency and the company supposedly licences the technology for free! I think this would really help for P4 chipset only requiring 1 channel or especially if AMD were to include support in the A64 for this. Sadly, I'm pretty sure AMD won't change the memory controller for a while but that seems like the best direction to move because they can get 2x the bandwidth without the higher latencies of DDR2 which would kill the low latency advantage of the on die memory controller.
That would seem like a painless upgrade route. Plus it seems that DDR2 yeilds are likely to reamain pretty low for a while (EXPENSIVE).
I guess some of Via's chipsets already support this but I was wondering why no one else has jumped on it considering that it's actually been around a little while, is fully backward compatible, retains low latency and the company supposedly licences the technology for free! I think this would really help for P4 chipset only requiring 1 channel or especially if AMD were to include support in the A64 for this. Sadly, I'm pretty sure AMD won't change the memory controller for a while but that seems like the best direction to move because they can get 2x the bandwidth without the higher latencies of DDR2 which would kill the low latency advantage of the on die memory controller.
That would seem like a painless upgrade route. Plus it seems that DDR2 yeilds are likely to reamain pretty low for a while (EXPENSIVE).