Originally posted by: dexvx
Originally posted by: Fox5
Anyhow, RDRAM disappeared because....
1. Too damn expensive. For the price of a stick of rdram, you could get an entire athlon system that would perform better.
2. RDRAM had very high latency, which greatly limited its performance.
3. DDR ram caught up in bandwidth, largely due to dual channel support.
Common misconceptions...
1) Rambus sued several dram makers for price fixing (as this was the reason that RDRam was overpriced compared to DDR). Many on this forum flamed rambus for doing so and bashed their lawyers; but just recently, Samsung has admitted to price fixing, along with several other major dram players.
2) High latency was only on the single channel i820 chipset. The dual channel i840 and i850 series had latency on par with DDR2. In fact, the i850 chipset's performance was not eclipsed until Canterwood.
3) DDR caught on in bandwidth because development of RDRam chipsets folded (see #1 on price fixing). On the roadmaps, Intel canceled a quad-channel RDRam chipset for the p4; if that went into production, the P4 would've had around 10GB/sec of FSB bandwidth.
---
On the side note, Rambus is an IP company. They develop plans and know-how for electronics, but don't produce anything. AFAIK, PS3 and Xbox360 use Rambus IP.