Rambus to power PlayStation 3?

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Rambus Inc. has licensed its memory boosting technology to Sony and Toshiba, which plan to use it in unspecified new products that are due out in three years' time. The shares of both companies jumped 17 percent on speculation that Rambus' technology will be used in combination with Cell, a new microprocessor that Sony, Toshiba, and IBM have planned for Sony's PlayStation 3.

Analysts confirm the timeline coincides with plans of the aforementioned companies; the PlayStation 3 is due out in 2005. The PlayStation 2 also features Rambus technology.

Rambus will receive royalty payments. The license is non-exclusive, which means both Microsoft and Nintendo could use the technology for their respective new consoles.

News source: Reuters

The timing of the outage was particularly bad, coming as it did at the opening of business on the East Coast of one of the biggest business days of the year, as people returned from holiday vacations. "It's a time when people are coming back to work. When systems fail, it's a double insult. This was the worst time for something like this to happen," Gardner said. "There might have been a small technical reason for this that will be easily fixed, but the perception among users will be, `I needed tis, and they weren't there for me.'" Moreover, switching to an alternative instant message provider is easy, Gardner said. "The market will be harsh to those that don't perform well, because the cost of switching is so very low," he said.

Surprisingly, Microsoft agreed.

"We agree that a large degree of reliability is necessary," Grothaus said. "We are taking steps to see to it that we don't see outages like this again."

But Michael Sampson, analyst with Ferris Research, said the impact of the outage on Microsoft will not be significant. He said Microsoft's instant message service had a July 2001 outage that lasted eight days.

"It's certainly not good for Microsoft, but those people that are wedded to MSN will keep using it. If they were paying for it, they would be a bit more annoyed," Sampson said.

It's uncertain just how many users were affected. Sampson said he estimates that Microsoft and America Online are the instant message market leaders, with about 30 million to 35 million active users each. AOL claims it has 180 million registered users, and Microsoft says it has 75 million, but many of those accounts are duplicates -- more than one account per person -- and inactive.

Microsoft will likely become market leader because of its instant message technology being included in Windows XP; when users register XP they are strongly urged to sign up for an MSN Messenger and Passport account, Sampson said.

#1 eilegz on 08 Jan 2003 - 18:39

maybe get ddr it would be cheaper

(2 replies) #2 Tobbe on 08 Jan 2003 - 18:43

Why does so many say "get DDR"? DDR = Double Data Rate. The most common RAM in new computers is DDR SDRAM. Maybe Rambus will be better? Rambus is expensive because of the low request.

#2.1 jago6498 on 08 Jan 2003 - 21:23

[neoquote=#2.0 by Tobbe]Why does so many say "get DDR"? DDR = Double Data Rate. The most common RAM in new computers is DDR SDRAM. Maybe Rambus will be better? Rambus is expensive because of the low request.[/neoquote] Actually RAMBUS prices are high b/c the Rambus company charges a rediculous amount in royalties. Nintendo used RAMBUS Ram in the N64 if I am not mistaken...PLUS...I think Rambus was sued not to long ago in regards to their royalty charges if I am not mistaken...

#2.2 Tobbe on 08 Jan 2003 - 22:15

[neoquote=#2.1 by jago6498]I think Rambus was sued not to long ago in regards to their royalty charges if I am not mistaken...[/neoquote] You're right... I think. hehe

#3 Hills420 on 08 Jan 2003 - 19:23

Sounds like the price of this console is going up everyday

#4 Danrarbc641 on 08 Jan 2003 - 19:31

The PS2 uses Rambus RAM too. I have no clue why they went with it again though.

#5 Solarix on 08 Jan 2003 - 19:54

RAMBUS memory heats up way too hot and fast

#6 Homie on 08 Jan 2003 - 20:11

RAMBUS of today heats up quickly and is expensive, but this is in 2005, I doubt they will release a console that will cost more than 300, 350 at launch tops, they know noone is gonna pay more than that, alot of people dont even want to pay 300

#7 panicst8 on 08 Jan 2003 - 22:16

RDRAM is a few dollars more expensive... who cares? It continually blows DDR away, even the old RDRAM 850E beats the new dual channel DDR... www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000337 When you look at all the benchmark data above, it is clear that something very interesting is going on. Granite Bay (dual channel DDR) has it all: slightly higher bandwidth than the fastest available 32 bit RDRAM channels, and up to 25% lower latency than the i850E and Rambus combination. Still, this fat 1005 pin chipset with its ultramodern memory controller is not able to beat the old i850E chipset with PC1066 RDRAM. From a performance point of view, the i850E is clearly the better workstation chipset. ... It is quite surprising that the better theoretical bandwidth and latency numbers of the Granite Bay do not result in a performance advantage. Turning around the bus takes a number of nanoseconds. During this time, no data traffic is possible as the DRAM does not get any commands. The higher the clockspeed of the controller, the longer the turnaround will take in terms of clockcycles. In other words, the higher the clockspeed, the more critical bus turnaround delays are. And that is not all. As DDR transfers twice as much data per clock, it also means that DDR loses more twice as much "data bandwidth" than SDRAM during the bus turnaround. RDRAM also uses the DDR technique, but it is designed to minimize bus turnaround latencies. The address and control busses work (more) independently and the Rambus chips are intelligent devices in the rambus transmission line, somewhat similar to several PCs in a network. The more efficient protocol and carefully planned timings of the control bus and address RDRAM bus makes the bus turnaround in roughly one clockcycle. That is one clockcycle of 1.87 ns that two 16 bit data transfers cannot happen. In case of DDR, the control bus has to introduce up to two cycles (DDR333=6 ns) to turn the bus around. Considering that the Granite Bay chipset considers the DRAM subsystem as one big 128 bit DRAM, this means that four transfers of 128 bit can not happen during the bus around. While the Dual DDR266 channel is up to 15% faster in reading long datastreams, the Rambus channels are up to 60% more efficient when handling writes and interspersed read and writes. So while most memory benchmarks report "read bandwidth" numbers, the reality is that overall, the i850E offers more bandwidth on average. The ASUS P4T533, the only i850E board with support for 32 bit RDRAM, is still overall the fastest chipset for the desktopuser. 32 bit RDRAM is a little faster than two channels of 16 bit RDRAM and in some quite a few workstation applications it significantly outperformed the i845PE and DDR333. For the desktop user, the ASUS P4T533 and P4T533-C are a pretty good deal. Excellent performance and overclockablility push the Pentium 4 to the highest framerates possible. As most desktop users do not need more than 512 MB, the price It is no accident that Intel's own 3.06 GHz evaluation kit shipped with a PC1066 RDRAM based board, and not Granite Bay.

#8 tkyoshi on 09 Jan 2003 - 05:29

Did you know, funny enough that the N64 uses Rambus?

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