<storage> A high bandwidth DRAM, designed by Rambus, Inc.
of Mountain View, CA.
RDRAM is used mainly for video accelerators, and also in the
Ultra 64 from Nintendo. It offers sustained transfer
rates of around 1000 Mbps, compared to 200 Mbps for ordinary
DRAM. Although it cannot be used as a direct replacement for
existing memory, it is likely that it will replace DRAM and
SDRAM as the main memory system in personal computers as
the bus speeds required by these machines increase. SDRAM
can operate up to around 100MHz, but RDRAM has been
demonstrated by the manufacturers running at 600MHz.
The memory is also only 8 or 9 bits wide, so the bandwidth
would increase enormously if it were used in parallel to give
32 or 64-bit memory.
(1996-12-13)
Nearby terms:
RAISE « RAL « RAM « Rambus DRAM » Rambus, Inc. » RAMDAC » RAM disk
