Winding up the highlife part, I’d like to add a few words about a hero of the days long gone – Rambus. If you think that it’s again about legal actions, you are wrong. The company is just being “reanimated”. Quite naturally, this task fell to the hands of the Japanese that are the leading RDRAM manufacturers now. Toshiba and Elpida in collaboration with Rambus announced new memory architecture – XDR DRAM. It is based on the high-speed data-transfer interface Yellowstone, Rambus announced quite a while ago. They promise clock-rates of 3.2-6.4GHz and higher with an up to 100GB/s bandwidth. That’s not going to be very fast, though: samples in the next year with mass production (if there’s any demand) in 2005.

It’s characteristic that another Rambus fan, the Korea-based Samsung licensed Yellowstone in July. And this fact makes it all the more serious – see the world top five above. However, Samsung claims it is going to use Yellowstone to its main purpose: as a data-transfer interface in household appliances, as well as graphics and communication equipment. On the other hand, they may mean exactly XDR – seems like no one has ever positioned it as a purely PC memory type.

As for personal computing, Samsung is trying to promote the good old RDRAM, if we can call it RDRAM: 64-bit width (against original 16) and clocked at 1.2GHz. Thus, we have RIMM PC1200 modules with a bandwidth of 9.6GB/s. Samsung showcased such products at the last Rambus developer forum. Of course, they are intended for the latest creation of SiS – the SiS R659 chipset. No other chipset maker supports RDRAM now.

Well, that’s about all the last July was notable for. As for niche markets, the news is the success of Ramtron’s FRAM – Promise is going to use 256Kb chips in its RAID controllers for storing operation-critical data. Matsushita also announced its intention to sample SOC chips with the ability to integrate into them necessary FRAM amounts. In case you forgot, Ferromagnetic Random Access Memory combines the advantages of both flash memory (nonvolatile) and DRAM/SRAM (low latencies, and fast overall operation). This memory type has been developed by numerous companies for a few years already. So, the fact that it’s now ready for the market is really nice – this memory has a bright future ahead.