what was the story of RAMBUS ram?

[AmongTheChosenX]

I read wikipedia... but it wasn't very descriptive. i was just wondering if anyone knew alot about it...

 

[Gorankar]

It really is there in the wiki for the most part. It was just a failed product when it came to system mem in pc's. It had potential, but no one wanted to buy licenses and make rdram. So supply was always tight, making it very expensive, and it did not live up to performance expectations. In fact many Intel P3 based mobos that did not rely on the translation chip were nearly as fast, or faster than the rdram equiped P3's in games, (not bullshit benches that proved useless), due to the much higher latencies that came with rdram. Intel quietly switched back to sdram and ddr for its motherboards.

Then RAMBUS started suing everybody for patent violations. Later many of the lawsuits were ended with RAMBUS on the loosing side much of the time.

This whole thing happened as the Athlon Classic and then Xp were really starting to take off. Because RAMBUS's rdram was so expensive, you could easily build an Athlon rig that outperformed a Pentium3 rig for the same or less money. Which put Intel at a disadvantage in the enthusiast community. Not being able to claim the performance crown had to hurt, considering how small their rival AMD was. Getting in bed with RAMBUS over rdram was one of Intel's larger missteps.

 

[AmongTheChosenX]

ouchhh...


do you think it could've actually gotten faster than SDRAM and eventually DDR RAM if it had continued?

 

[Brain_ReCall]

Well, general short-story is something like this.

Intel pulls out a new chipset for the Pentium 3 that supports this new type of RAM. Previously, it was only seen in devices such as the Nintendo N64. It promises huge performance benefits, and from synthetic benchmarks it generally appeared faster.
RDRAM on the P3 wasn't very good. So, Intel tried again with the Pentium 4. The result was a general dislike by all in the enthusiast market for several reasons.

- RDRAM is a proprietary design by RAMBUS. Therefore, there was an extra fee tacked onto the RAM. At release it was about 5x more than similar SDRAM, and at one point was worth more than its weight in solid gold (literally).
- RDRAM was "serialized" technology. It had crazy-fast frequencies, but usually ran at 1/4 the bit width of SDRAM. Also, RDRAM suffered from high latency, since the modules were interconnected, requiring data from one module to go through several other modules before it got to the memory controller.
- RDRAM wasn't really that much faster compared to SDRAM, mostly thanks to its very high latency. There were no benefits on the P3 platform, and later advancements in DDR on the P4 ruined its lead.
- It sucked power and blasted heat. RDRAM is known for the first RAM type requiring heatsinks.
- RDRAM had to be installed in pairs, and worse yet unused slots had to use "continuity RIMMS" to complete the data path. This two combinations restricted upgrade options.
- A lot of people got the impression from Intel that they were being forced to use RDRAM. Intel, for a long time, insisted the P4 would be RDRAM only. They changed their tune once the outcry was loud enough.
They tried to push RDRAM so hard they developed the MTH (memory translator hub). It was an extra chip that allowed SDRAM to be used with the RDRAM-only i820 chipset. The MTH was so bad Intel had to recall all of the motherboards with them.

So, RDRAM was expensive, limited, not that much faster than existing technology, and did I mention expensive? In some ways DDR3 might be compared to the RDRAM of our times.

I won't even get into RAMBUS as a company. Check out their wikipedia pages to see all the litigation, instead of innovation, that they now do.

 

[Gorankar]

ouchhh...


do you think it could've actually gotten faster than SDRAM and eventually DDR RAM if it had continued?

Perhaps, but other mem tech was still being advanced as well. Multiple channels of DDR and DDR2, now DDR3, tomorrow DDR4 or DDR5 or whatever. Who can say where rdram would be now, price and performance wise, had it ended up being the standard for pc memory.

 

[AmongTheChosenX]

i wonder if anyone can speculate.

 

[maleficarus]

Ok now that the bullshit posters finished spewing there bias. I was a P4 RDRAM user, yes, I actualy used the shit so I can talk about it unlike most people here who never actualy used RDRAM...

RDRAM was faster then anything DDR had on the market. ALL the benches showed and showed again RDRAM killing DDR in pretty much every way. When I was using PC-800 the best DDR had to offer was DDR-266. Math is math guys regardless of your own personal bias...

RDRAM didn't suffer from heat issues like the one guy in this thread suggests. RDRAM came with heat shields as default (much like DDR2 today!) and I don't ever recall having any issues with heat whatsoever. RDRAM during P4 release was actually no more exspensive then SDRAM, at least not enough to bitch about. RDRAM was imo, the better technology plain and simple!

The reason everyone hated it from what I could gather wasen't the tech, but there disliked the company behind it--and that was what killed RDRAM much like 3dfx with everyone loving to hate them! Also imo, at that exact time everyone was on the AMD athon bandwagon and for that sole purpose alone disliked the fact that Intel had memory tech that was killing anything AMD could muster. That is the truth!!

 

[maleficarus]

Well, general short-story is something like this.

Intel pulls out a new chipset for the Pentium 3 that supports this new type of RAM. Previously, it was only seen in devices such as the Nintendo N64. It promises huge performance benefits, and from synthetic benchmarks it generally appeared faster.
RDRAM on the P3 wasn't very good. So, Intel tried again with the Pentium 4. The result was a general dislike by all in the enthusiast market for several reasons.

- RDRAM is a proprietary design by RAMBUS. Therefore, there was an extra fee tacked onto the RAM. At release it was about 5x more than similar SDRAM, and at one point was worth more than its weight in solid gold (literally).
- RDRAM was "serialized" technology. It had crazy-fast frequencies, but usually ran at 1/4 the bit width of SDRAM. Also, RDRAM suffered from high latency, since the modules were interconnected, requiring data from one module to go through several other modules before it got to the memory controller.
- RDRAM wasn't really that much faster compared to SDRAM, mostly thanks to its very high latency. There were no benefits on the P3 platform, and later advancements in DDR on the P4 ruined its lead.
- It sucked power and blasted heat. RDRAM is known for the first RAM type requiring heatsinks.
- RDRAM had to be installed in pairs, and worse yet unused slots had to use "continuity RIMMS" to complete the data path. This two combinations restricted upgrade options.
- A lot of people got the impression from Intel that they were being forced to use RDRAM. Intel, for a long time, insisted the P4 would be RDRAM only. They changed their tune once the outcry was loud enough.
They tried to push RDRAM so hard they developed the MTH (memory translator hub). It was an extra chip that allowed SDRAM to be used with the RDRAM-only i820 chipset. The MTH was so bad Intel had to recall all of the motherboards with them.

So, RDRAM was expensive, limited, not that much faster than existing technology, and did I mention expensive? In some ways DDR3 might be compared to the RDRAM of our times.

I won't even get into RAMBUS as a company. Check out their wikipedia pages to see all the litigation, instead of innovation, that they now do.

I'll bet the barn and everything in it right now, at the time you were using an AMD Athon with DDR...LOL

 

[AmongTheChosenX]

yeah it does seem like it had a slight advantage over DDR at the time, until DDR advanced.

anyone else?

 

[Nenu]

Rambus made such a bad name for themselves by overpricing, making memory that ran very hot, suing other memory manufacturers with intent to increase opposing technology costs and their products didnt help system performance much.
Intel signed up to use Rambus for their performance hardware which cost a lot more and didnt perform much better anyway.
After Rambus made a bad show, even Intel distanced themselves from Rambus and stopped using their memory.

I'm glad, Rambus deserve to sink.
I despise that company.

ps I have used Rambus kit and sold it (to those that insisted on having it)
Everyone who passed comment after purchasing a Rambus memory PC regretted the decision as their upgrade path was stopped dead due to the ridiculous cost.

 

[maleficarus]

Rambus made such a bad name for themselves by overpricing, making memory that ran very hot, suing other memory manufacturers with intent to increase opposing technology costs and their products didnt help system performance much.
Intel signed up to use Rambus for their performance hardware which cost a lot more and didnt perform much better anyway.
After Rambus made a bad show, even Intel distanced themselves from Rambus and stopped using their memory.

I'm glad, Rambus deserve to sink.
I despise that company.

ps I have used Rambus kit and sold it (to those that insisted on having it)
Everyone who passed comment after purchasing a Rambus memory PC regretted the decision as their upgrade path was stopped dead due to the ridiculous cost.

Honestly, there was a short time when RDRAM was really expensive. Then it fell down to comparable prices with DDR-266 and DDR-333. Near the end before Intel announced it will no longer support RDRAM it was on par with DDR in terms of price. I know I used to faithfully look at pricing because I wanted to buy more RDRAM.

It really only got bad press because of the popularity of the AMD Athon which didn't support RDRAM only DDR. If everyone favors AMD they will naturally stick with DDR. I could almost guarantee with 100% certainty that if Intel had the better chip at that time (arguable that they didn't) RDRAM would still be with us today...

I sold my RDRAM set up on eBay and offset the cost of my DDR2 switch over =)

 

[Eva_Unit_0]

there's a lot of bias in this thread. I'll try to give the rundown as neutrally as possible:

1.RAMBUS was a new kind of high-latency high-bandwidth ram that kicked the snot out of old-skool SDRAM and was slightly faster than single channel DDR.

2. Intel signed a license agreement with RAMBUS that all of their chipsets would use RAMBUS for some period of time, I think it was a couple years. This is where the good old intel i820, i840, i860 and friends came in.

3. Intel realized this was a dumb move. RDRAM was a specially licensed technology and it was overly expensive and awkward for end users to upgrade due to the reasons mentioned higher in the thread. Also, DDR was a boatload cheaper and not a whole lot slower.

4. As soon as intel's licensing agreement ran out, they instantly introduced the i845 to get a DDR platform out. i865/i875 came along with dual-channel DDR that beat RAMBUS in every way so RAMBUS was obsolete.

EDIT: to those people saying that RAMBUS didn't do jack for the pentium 3, that's a "well duh" kind of observation. The Pentium 3's rode a SDR 133mhz bus. PC133 was enough to saturate it, let alone DDR or RAMBUS. Intel only made RAMBUS chipsets for the P3 because of the aforementioned license agreement that forced them to.

 

[SmokeRngs]

Ok now that the bullshit posters finished spewing there bias. I was a P4 RDRAM user, yes, I actualy used the shit so I can talk about it unlike most people here who never actualy used RDRAM...

RDRAM was faster then anything DDR had on the market. ALL the benches showed and showed again RDRAM killing DDR in pretty much every way. When I was using PC-800 the best DDR had to offer was DDR-266. Math is math guys regardless of your own personal bias...

RDRAM didn't suffer from heat issues like the one guy in this thread suggests. RDRAM came with heat shields as default (much like DDR2 today!) and I don't ever recall having any issues with heat whatsoever. RDRAM during P4 release was actually no more exspensive then SDRAM, at least not enough to bitch about. RDRAM was imo, the better technology plain and simple!

The reason everyone hated it from what I could gather wasen't the tech, but there disliked the company behind it--and that was what killed RDRAM much like 3dfx with everyone loving to hate them! Also imo, at that exact time everyone was on the AMD athon bandwagon and for that sole purpose alone disliked the fact that Intel had memory tech that was killing anything AMD could muster. That is the truth!!

From the time it came out, RDRAM was more expensive than competing technologies. It wasn't new technology expensive, it was a hell of a lot more expensive. There was RDRAM 600, 700 and 800. The 600 and 700 were no faster than SDRAM on the P3 and DDR on the P4. The only way to get any performance out of it was to go with the 800. The 800 was a hell of a lot more expensive than the other two.

Heat was a problem with RIMMs. Due to the high frequencies, they ran hot. Because of this, the yields of the chips were lousy which drove the price up further.

RDRAM had a lot of bandwidth, but the latency was terrible. That's one of the reasons why the P3 did horrible with RDRAM. It was a latency sensitive processor architecture and the high latency of RDRAM hurt its performance. It performed better with the P4 in some things because of the bandwidth hungry and latent nature of the Netburst architecture.

By the time the P4 had high bandwidth and low latency dual channel DDR, RDRAM couldn't keep up anymore. A new version of RDRAM with a wider bus among other changes came around the same time. However, it was expensive especially since the price of DDR had plummeted and faded out.

There was a reason why people avoided new Intel chipsets when the P3 came out. RDRAM was very expensive, hot and underperforming. This was one of the reasons why the BX P2 chipset stayed around for so long. It allowed you to use SDRAM with your P3 with better performance than RDRAM and it was cheaper.

RDRAM itself wasn't very good. It had some good technology but it wasn't mature enough to be a good product. If the second version of RDRAM had been the first, then it may have succeeded. The other problem with RDRAM was the exclusive deal Intel had signed with RAMBUS. People did not like being forced into an expensive and underperforming solution. If Intel had allowed the market to decide, we might still have RDRAM today.

Did I have a P3 or P4 with RDRAM? No. I spent my money wisely and avoided an RDRAM platform. It held no advantages over SDRAM and DDR and had a price premium. That makes for a really bad value product.

 

[brycejones]

There was RDRAM 600, 700 and 800. The 600 and 700 were no faster than SDRAM on the P3 and DDR on the P4. The only way to get any performance out of it was to go with the 800. The 800 was a hell of a lot more expensive than the other two.

You forgot one PC-1066 which was the last somewhat commonly available speed. That memory combined with a fast P4 was the fastest combination you could get at the time. But the memory was stupid expensive and remains so today. Dell had some stupid deal on a desktop that used that memory. My friend and I bought them, I sold mine after a year for basically what I paid for it.

My friend on the other hand hung onto his till the bitter end. Really all it needed was a memory upgrade but just to add 512MB was going to run almost $400 and that was a year ago. So PC-1066 modules are not quite worth their weight in gold but they come damn close.

 

[MrGuvernment]

256mb of pc-800 still goes for like $100+ is you can find it, we have 2 dell dimension 8205 desktop here with crapbus in them 512 each, but i am not about to spenmd $300 to get them to 1G even though ever other part in them is still good.

 

[SmokeRngs]

You forgot one PC-1066 which was the last somewhat commonly available speed. That memory combined with a fast P4 was the fastest combination you could get at the time. But the memory was stupid expensive and remains so today. Dell had some stupid deal on a desktop that used that memory. My friend and I bought them, I sold mine after a year for basically what I paid for it.

My friend on the other hand hung onto his till the bitter end. Really all it needed was a memory upgrade but just to add 512MB was going to run almost $400 and that was a year ago. So PC-1066 modules are not quite worth their weight in gold but they come damn close.

That was the stuff that came on later down the line that was halfway worth a damn but too little too late. I'm not going to claim to have 100% knowledge and memory of RDRAM.

 

[The Pharaoh]

I had a P4 1.7GHz with 512MB PC-800 RDRAM and an Athlon XP at 1.8 with 512MB DDR-266 and I felt like the AMD rig was much faster in both Windows applications and gaming. Plus the RDRAM could burn your fingers easily...no heat issues my foot, more like a perfect match for those early P4!

 

[Gorankar]

I had a P4 1.7GHz with 512MB PC-800 RDRAM and an Athlon XP at 1.8 with 512MB DDR-266 and I felt like the AMD rig was much faster in both Windows applications and gaming. Plus the RDRAM could burn your fingers easily...no heat issues my foot, more like a perfect match for those early P4!

The early P4's were substantially slower clock for clock than the P3's and Athlon Xp's in most things. It was not til the P4's got over 2.3/2.4ghz that they started to take any lead on the Athlon Xp's clocked at 1.8/1.9ghz or above with the exception of, at the time very rare, SSE2 optimized software. What's worse is that an early 1.4 ghz P4 was not much faster than a 1ghz P3 on a BX in most things and actually slower in a few things. The P4 was designed to need high clock speeds to get the work done, and it was designed to reach those speeds.

That goes a lot farther to explain the speed difference than the rdram in your case.