RIMM for AMD?

It has been proven in numerous benchmarks that RIMM out perform DDR in most tests and for the P4 to compete with the Athalon the P4 needs RIMMs.
I was wondering why there aren’t chipsets for the Athalon to support RIMMs? Is it just the architecture of the Athalon which cannot support RIMMs or that Intel don't allow RIMM chipsets to be developed for the Athalon.

The Athlon has been around for a long long time, so I think we can ask you to spell it correctly. Not that it's a big deal.

Anyway, your assessment on why no RIMMs on AMD chips is probably correct. As far as I know, RIMMs have higher bandwidth, but suffer from poor latency. AMD decided that they would be better off concentrating on DDR hoping that future generations of it would result in better bandwidth while maintaining the latency advantage.

INTC doesn't control RIMM chipsets, unless it is for INTC products. AMD has a license to produce RDRAM chipsets but have chosen not to do it.

Cheers,
F

intel doesnt control RAMBUS

RAMBUS provides more memory bandwidth than the athlon bus can handle (only 266mhz) while the p4 is matched to RAMBUS (400mhz)

no performance increase,and the cost of rambus at the time stopped AMD from even looking at rambus

I wonder if SiS has any in the works?

Yup, they do. Here is a link to an article about it.

Near as I can tell, the athlon was not particularly bandwidth hungry at the conception of RDRAM. It's only recently with the high clocked ones where the extra bandwidth makes a difference.
I distinctly recall initial DDR was only a scant few percent better than PC133, so there would have been no serious drive to go for high bandwidth and high expense of RDRAM.
Since dual channel DDR is on the way, there is certainly no need for RIMMS now the athlons actually need extra bandwidth.

sis has that chipset yes
but its not for a socket A chipset
its for P4's

i'll be damned if i could answer that

RDRAM/RIMM is just what the athlon needs to excel

VaTechHokies said:

Yup, they do. Here is a link to an article about it.

Click to expand...

yeah, but they're not talking about rambus for the athlon
*sigh*

I think the reason that AMD never went for RDRam was because they new it they stuck with with DDR Ram, and DDR Stayed way cheaper then RDRAM (which it did for a long time), it would screw Intel (which it did).

I couldn't be happier with the way things turned out. Intel learned it couldn't control everything and AMD benefited greatly.

The differing CPU architectures dictated the best fit for memory. P4's require a high clock speed and high bandwidth memory to perform, and the Athlons require low latency memory. The more bandwidth that can be provided the Athlon the better, but moving to higher latency in doing so is not a good idea. The deeper CPU pipelines of the P4 mean that the memory latency isn't as much of a bottleneck. The lower clocks, but more work performed per clock, in the AMD's require low latency.

The fact that RIMM's have to be purchased in pairs, and in many cases memory has to be discarded/recycled to upgrade, makes them a PITA.

RMBS was once one of the hottest stocks on NASDAQ trading at $400+ per share in July 2000 when it had a 4 for 1 split. Friday it was valued at $6.63.

in real world performance and not theoretical bandwidth, DDR333 performs about on par with pc800 RDRAM. DDR400 or DDRII should be right on par with pc1066, but cheaper.

Intel is royally screwing themselves out of performance by ditching RDram later this year. Athlon's arent designed for that kind of ram, as stated earlier.

-Malakai