After admitting delays because of technical difficulties, Intel Corp has taken another step toward establishing Rambus as a future memory chip interconnection standard. The chip giant has ratified Samsung Corp’s 72Mb and 144Mb Rambus dynamic random dynamic access memory chips (RDRAMs) as compliant with its independent Rambus specifications.
An Intel spokesperson admitted that there had been delays with the Rambus project. Intel was originally due to ship its 820 Camino chipset with RDRAM chips in the first quarter this year. Now it says the 820 chipset, with Samsung RDRAMs, will ship in September and expects to hit volume shipments by the end of the year.
Samsung began 72Mb and 144Mb Rambus chips production in January and plans to produce around five million 128Mb and 144Mb chips in the second half this year. By 2001, the company expects the RDRAM market to be worth around $13.5bn, or half the of the main memory market.
The 820 chipset will represent the first phase of Intel wholeheartedly moving over to the interconnect technology. Memory would become a bottleneck in the platform if we stuck with SDRAM, the spokesperson commented. Intel will use double data rate synchronous dynamic random access (SDRAM) chips – a rival interconnect method – for specific applications, such as graphics chip board memory. However, Intel claimed that that there was only a short term benefit to be had from double data rate technology and that only Rambus offered the headroom that would be necessary in the future for main PC memory applications.
