Rambus and Elpida Memory today announced that Elpida had signed a licensing agreement to incorporate Rambus' Yellowstone interface technology into Elpida's DRAM product portfolio for high-bandwidth applications.

Yellowstone offers a quantum leap in performance in memory signalling while lowering system cost through pin-count reduction and support for low-cost, high-volume PCBs and packages. The flexible architecture enables customised memory solutions to satisfy various market needs over the next decade, including digital consumer, networking, and graphics applications, according to Rambus.

Certain sources said that Yellowstone technology allows transferring data at 3.20-6.40Mb/s speed (you may also consider the Mb/s speed as resulting MHz when we talk about double or quad data rate transfer type). If implemented in 128-bit mode, the peak memory bandwidth of such system will reach 102.40GB/s.

At this time there is no word about memory chips able to work at 1.60-3.20GHz in double data rate mode with resulting speed of 3.20-6.40Mb/s.

If there were no customers who wanted to utilise RDRAM memory, then, Elpida would never obtain licenses for any technologies from Rambus. With the announcement we can conclude that there is still a part of DRAM market where Elpida plans to sell its future products incorporating Yellowstone technology from the Los Altos-based developer.

Elpida supplies RDRAM memory for Sony PlayStation2 consoles, I assume that the company will also supply this kind of memory for the next-generation console from Sony. Basically, this is where Toshiba and Elpida seem to intend to sell the majority of their RDRAM chips.