Intel Pentium III 1GHz

Intel’s Hurdles - RDRAM

Intel has had to overcome quite a bit in the past 6 months alone.  Not only have they had to face fierce competition from AMD, but they have also had problems with promoting the acceptance of RDRAM as a memory standard, thus creating problems for their 820 chipset which depends on the success of RDRAM in order to become a widely adopted platform.

While it may seem as if RDRAM is the root of all evil and the absolute cause of Intel’s problems in recent history, you have to understand that RDRAM does have quite a bit of potential for success.  The two factors holding back RDRAM right now are the costs of manufacturing and the low yields that manufacturers that are actually producing chips/modules have been seeing. 

While there are supposedly new techniques in development and on the verge of implementation that are designed to cut the manufacturing costs of RDRAM, there is still quite a bit of skepticism from the industry about exactly how viable of an option RDRAM is right now.

Yields have been increasing, and while the yields on PC800 RDRAM isn’t even remotely close to what manufacturers can claim for their PC100/PC133 SDRAM chips, it is increasing to an almost reasonable point.  One of the biggest problems is that Samsung is currently the only major producer of RDRAM in the world, and whenever there is a lack of competition in a particular market there is definitely a lack of competitive pricing. 

Intel specifically addressed the issues related to RDRAM at their latest Developer Forum in a track dedicated to memory technologies of the future.  In this presentation track, Intel described some of the corrective actions they are presently taking to make RDRAM a more viable memory option in 2000. 

Intel is currently working on adding more details to the layout guidelines in an indirect effort to help increase the yields and reliability of these modules at higher frequencies, especially PC800.  They are also implementing an enhanced validation process in an effort to bring RDRAM to the point that it is as easy to manufacture as SDRAM is right now.  Although this is quite some time away, it’s steadily approaching. 

According to Intel, by the end of this quarter there should be about four vendors shipping RDRAM; unfortunately, they failed to mention in what quantities these vendors would be shipping their RIMM modules.  If yields continue to be as low as they are now, even the six vendors that are due to be shipping by the end of Q2 will have trouble producing enough RDRAM in order to drive costs down.  Let’s hope, for Intel’s sake, that things do change because they recently reaffirmed their dedication to RDRAM and plan on keeping it in all of their future platform designs.

The reasoning behind their dedication to RDRAM is actually quite valid.  Not only does RDRAM offer greater memory bandwidth than competing SDRAM solutions out today, it is supposedly more efficient than DDR SDRAM and features a lower pin count than DDR SDRAM as well.  A recent trend we’ve been noticing is towards serialization, and lowering pin count which allows for an easier time when doubling bandwidth as well as producing high frequency devices.  RDRAM definitely follows this trend, as do technologies such as Serial ATA, so there is definitely an opportunity for success but as of now, that potential is limited by other factors such as manufacturing costs.