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Articles: Editorial

E3 Expo 2005: Hardware Innovation Behind the Gaming Fun (page 5)

Category: Editorial

by Anna Filatova

[ 05/19/2005 | 09:18 PM ]

Rambus: “We Are Really into PS3”

The situation in the gaming console market can now be called a “perfect storm”: we had three major announcements within a short period of time (you cane read more about the announcements from Sony and Microsoft in our news), which inevitably pushed the market activity up. I am sure that if you are following the exciting news from the E3 show you couldn’t miss the Sony PlayStation 3 announcement. Sony developed this solution not only working closely with NVIDIA but also with Rambus, who offered their high-speed XDR technology to be implemented in the PS3.

Right now Rambus XDR provides the I/O bandwidth of 100GB/sec in and out, and the memory bandwidth of 25GB/sec, which seems to be just enough to satisfy the need for data. Modern transistors are so fast that in case of insufficient memory bandwidth the data cannot be delivered on time. This is where Rambus steps in with their high-speed XDR technology offering really high speed data transfer rates. As a result, cell processors supporting this technology are not starved for memory and processor-to-processor bandwidth. And they can potentially work at speeds no commercial processor has ever worked at.

Besides, the narrow high-speed interface developed by Rambus gives the opportunity to shrink the processor die tremendously. If you take a the combined die size of the processor and the graphics synthesizer in PlayStation one (these were two separate chips in those days) as a reference, then with the current level of technological advancement you will be able to shrink the die to only 1/6 of what it used to be. And since Sony is the lucky one here to have this technology at their disposal, it gives them truly long-term die shrink plan.

I had a really interesting discussion with Steven Woo from Rambus today, and he sounded very excited about the innovations in the console market. “This is the first show we can say we are really into PS3”, he said.