Rambus watched its RDRAM lose market in favor of DDR. DDR3 is supposed to be next hot memory type, but Rambus has new one that is XDR. Will it become its big brother? Maybe not, because it has more going for it, including that radical new processor you may have been hearing about, called Cell.

Is XDR the future?

Do you memorize when DDR was released? There is DDR400, which runs at 200 MHz, which is similar to PC3200. Now take look at DDR2. This is the next step up from DDR. DDR2 will run up to 800 MHz. looks fast enough for a moment. The best CPUs only run at 233 MHz, so why do we want faster RAM?

There is no need for faster RAM, but PC speeds are rapidly increasing. So wouldn’t DDR3 be a logical option for next RAM after DDR2? Yes, but there is other new memory type that is promising. The new memory is called eXtreme Data Rate (XDR), and was developed by Rambus.

Rambus had other kind of memory known as RDRAM. RDRAM was supposed to substitute SDRAM, but it did not at that task. While there were chipsets that supported this RAM, DDR rapidly stormed market, and RDRAM vanished from scene. Will their new RAM follow same road, or will it come flying out of the gate?

The basic

Rambus is hopeful that new XDR memory takes off in PC memory with other devices like gaming systems and digital TVs. The applications of memory may range to various directions, but it will all work mainly the same. There are five main elements of XDR.

• DRAM
• Memory Controller
• IO Cell
• Interconnect
• Clock Generator