In a statement made by memory developer RAMBUS, the company claimed that their newly released XDR2 memory is five times faster than today's fastest GDDR DRAM chips, as currently used on all high-end graphics solutions.
The company says that their new RAMBUS XDR2 technology makes use of a micro-threaded DRAM core among other circuit enhancements that allows them to deliver data rates at a healthy 8GHz. The graphics memory used on the upcoming Playstation 3 is XDR1, running at a modest 4.8GHz, which will deliver bandwidth approaching 50GB/sec according to RAMBUS' Senior Principle Engineer, Steven Woo.
Interestingly, Tony Tamassi, NVIDIA's VP of Technical Marketing made a statistical projection in 2004 anticipating that a state-of-the-art 3D game could require memory bandwidth in the region of 3TB/sec.
Micro threading is a technology that allows for multiple data requests to be made at the same time; further expanding on NVIDIA's ethos, where they feel that parallelism is the way forwards in graphics. By enabling memory to access data with an element of parallelism, we can assume that the graphics subsystem will be able to make better use of the available data transfer rates.
Rambus told us that the XDR2 memory interface is now open for licensing and they expect products based on the technology to begin shipping in 2007. By this time, Longhorn should be released along with the WGF2.0 specification. Thus, we should begin seeing ATI and NVIDIA releasing unified shader architectures, similar to the Xbox 360 GPU, with XDR2 memory interfaces, should they choose to licence XDR2 from RAMBUS.
Do you think ATI and NVIDIA will licence this technology for their next, next generation GPUs? Let us know your thoughts
The company says that their new RAMBUS XDR2 technology makes use of a micro-threaded DRAM core among other circuit enhancements that allows them to deliver data rates at a healthy 8GHz. The graphics memory used on the upcoming Playstation 3 is XDR1, running at a modest 4.8GHz, which will deliver bandwidth approaching 50GB/sec according to RAMBUS' Senior Principle Engineer, Steven Woo.
Interestingly, Tony Tamassi, NVIDIA's VP of Technical Marketing made a statistical projection in 2004 anticipating that a state-of-the-art 3D game could require memory bandwidth in the region of 3TB/sec.
Micro threading is a technology that allows for multiple data requests to be made at the same time; further expanding on NVIDIA's ethos, where they feel that parallelism is the way forwards in graphics. By enabling memory to access data with an element of parallelism, we can assume that the graphics subsystem will be able to make better use of the available data transfer rates.
Rambus told us that the XDR2 memory interface is now open for licensing and they expect products based on the technology to begin shipping in 2007. By this time, Longhorn should be released along with the WGF2.0 specification. Thus, we should begin seeing ATI and NVIDIA releasing unified shader architectures, similar to the Xbox 360 GPU, with XDR2 memory interfaces, should they choose to licence XDR2 from RAMBUS.
Do you think ATI and NVIDIA will licence this technology for their next, next generation GPUs? Let us know your thoughts
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