X-bit labs

Rambus Celebrates XDR Shipments Milestone.

Category: Memory

by Anton Shilov

[ 06/11/2007 | 11:58 PM ]

Rambus, a leading designer of memory and interface technologies, on Monday said that its partners have shipped 25 million XDR memory chips worldwide. Even though the number seems to be high, it indicates that Sony’s PlayStation 3 game console uses the vast majority of all XDR output and that there are hardly many other customers utilizing XDR.

As of 31^st of March, 2007, it was estimated that Sony produced approximately 5.5 million of its latest gaming machines. It is known that every PS3 uses four 512Mb XDR memory chips, which means that 22 million of XDR devices were installed into PlayStation 3 as of late March. Keeping in mind that XDR memory has been shipping since January, 2005, it is clear that the vast majority of XDR devices are integrated into PlayStation 3, whereas other devices, namely IBM’s blade-servers powered by Cell processors, use only a tiny fraction of those 25 million shipments.

But Rambus does not seem to lose hope and believes that eventually XDR will be found in other applications requiring high memory bandwidth amid low pin-count. Numerous leading consumer electronics companies, such as Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba said they would adopt Rambus’ XDR memory for their devices, including Sony’s PlayStation 3 console and Panasonic’s digital TV-sets. Certain networking companies are also interested in XDR.

XDR DRAM can operate at 3.20GHz to 6.40GHz clock-speeds, providing industry leading bandwidth per pin, which is a benefit for networking and consumer applications. The XDR memory architecture features a number of advanced technologies built on patented Rambus innovations that include low-voltage, low-power differential Rambus signaling level (DRSL), octal data rate (ODR) technology that transfers eight bits of data each clock cycle, FlexPhase circuit technology for precise on-chip alignment of data with clock and dynamic-point-to-point (DPP) for both enhanced signal integrity and scalability.

“The market is demanding higher performance memory solutions to satisfy the needs of multi-core processing and other compute-intensive applications. The XDR memory architecture, coupled with our engineering services, gives our customers a competitive advantage in both performance and time-to-market,” said Sharon Holt, senior vice president of sales, licensing, and marketing at Rambus.