Fastest memory in the world

The Korean manufacturer claims that XDR RAM (eXtreme Data Rate) is the fastest memory module in the world, allowing rates of up to 8 GBps, which is about ten times faster than the classic DDR 400.

The first model to be produced is a 256 MB module and it addresses mainly multimedia applications, such as Sony's Cell processor that will support the technology.

A few months from now, Samsung will start producing a bigger sibling, 512 MB worth of juice, and that little baby will boost a 12.8 GBps bandwidth.

XDR memory, formerly known as Yellowstone, was crated by Rambus as the successor for the RDRAM system (back in 2000/2001), which was thought to replace classic DRAM.

The technology provided much more speed than DDR and was promoted by industry giants such as Samsung and Intel. RDRAM didn't get the response it was going for because of the high prices it involved but also of legal patent infringement issues that Rambus threw at most of the memory manufacturers.

Now, XDR memory will still fit with the higher-end of the market, and even though industry sources claim it will show great additional speed compared to current GDDR memory, no pricing information has been made public so far.

Over the next two years, Rambus intends to scale XDR from currently 2.4 GHz in steps of 800 MHz up to 8 GHz. XDR could also become an option for performance PC and graphic cards until 2006.

According to Michael Ching, product marketing manager at Rambus, while current 256-bit graphics processor with 1.6 GHz GDDR3 memory can offer a bandwidth of 50 GByte per second, the same processor provides 256 GByte per second with XDR.