Rambus is a quite small company that is developing different types of technologies and then sells or licenses them to different computer hardware producers like Intel, AMD and so on. Rambus became known a few years back, in the golden days of the Intel Pentium 4s and the AMD's Athlon XP series. Back then, there were several memory standards fighting over market shares and the situation looked good for a new memory type that would bring a significant speed advantage.

So Rambus approached Intel and after some months of negotiations they signed a deal. Rambus sold Intel and others the technology for building RDRAM, which came in the form of RIMMs and because they were pretty expensive and only worked with Intel processors (no x86 compatibility here, buddy, keep going) they were anything but a big success.

Nowadays, RIMMs and their kind are only still present in a few old computers, but it looks like we will see another "ultra very mega high proprietary memory standard" soon enough. According to the Web based computer industry news site Digitimes, the Rambus company is actively trying to make contact with Asian memory chip makers in an attempt to sell them another memory technology called XDR. So far it looks like only Samsung, Qimonda, and Elpida expressed an interest in this memory architecture and by the way, up to this moment, only they have been licensed to adopt it.

According to the Rambus company, their XDR memory technology can reach a very high 102GB/s data bandwidth (I think I'll take that with a grain of salt) as opposed to only 12.8GB/s for the DDR2, and 25.6GB/s for the DDR3 standard. Their XDR memory modules should support the much higher bandwidths of the future multi core processors. Rambus also declared that XDR memory shipments already jumped over the 25 million units mark, as Sony's PS3 gaming platform uses them.