Rambus (RMBS)

[cordob]

On "Turbo PCIe"
(posted similar message on the Fool, where the only interest is now stock price and not the technology this company stands for.

There was an announcement yesterday of double speed PCIe coming up. A we know Rambus already announced this as "turbo PCI Express" some time ago, which led me to this:
I had been wondering when it would happen (given that the hypertransport.org already upped their specs twice). We knew of course that Rambus had defined a "turbo PCIe" physical specification at double the normal speed of 2.5 Gb/s, but I was wondering when will there be a use for it.

It seems to be a future spec, sort of, at the pci special interest group (pcisig.org), see for the announcement:

http://www.pcisig.com/news_room/news/press_releases/2004_12_15/
or
http://www.pcisig.com/news_room/news/press_releases/2004_12_15/2004_12_15.pdf

PCI-SIG Announces PCI Express Architecture Performance Extension
Planned Specification Doubles Current Data Rate to 5GT/s
[emphasis mine]
PORTLAND, Ore. – December 15, 2004 — The PCI-SIG®, the Special Interest Group responsible for PCI Express™ architecture, announced today that the data rate for the next planned revision of the PCI Express specification will be 5 Giga transfers per second. This new specification extends the performance capability of its flagship I/O interconnect architecture to meet the anticipated system requirements across computer and communication industry applications. The doubling of the data rate follows historical performance increases for I/O specifications in the industry.

The PCI-SIG board of directors considered market requirements and technical analysis of a range of data rates to obtain the most feasible, highest performance, backward compatible solution within the current PCI Express ecosystem. Platform implementation cost, high-volume manufacturability, system topologies, validation and interoperability were the key considerations studied by the PCI-SIG board members in the process to extend the PCI Express data rate to 5GT/s.

Many of the leading electrical experts who developed the PCI Express 1.0a specifications have been chartered to draft the new specification. The PCI-SIG expects to deliver the new specification in the second half of 2005 in time for product introductions beginning in 2007.

"The PCI-SIG continues to deliver on the promise of timely PCI Express enhancements to meet the ever-growing bandwidth requirements of the I/O industry," said Tony Pierce, PCI-SIG chairman. "The board of directors thoughtfully considered an array of technical and market data and arrived at the best decision for the next revision of the PCI Express architecture. We plan to deliver the new 5GT/s PCI Express specification consistent with our members’ expectations for 100% backward compatibility, low-cost manufacturability and world-class compliance and interoperability."

"The new 5GT/s PCI Express specification will enable the required performance boost for bandwidth-hungry applications such as cinema-quality graphics and multimedia, enterprise servers and storage, and multi-gigabit networking," said Ajay Bhatt, chairman of the PCI Express steering committee, responsible for managing the technical development and coordination of PCI Express specifications. "The electrical specification will introduce evolutionary methodologies to meet the technical challenges of running at 5 Giga transfers per second while maintaining compatibility with existing system topologies and silicon processes."


One interesting point in the "benefits" of being a PCI SIG member is the following:
Benefits of PCI-SIG Membership
PCI-SIG members can participate in the review of all PCI specifications before they are released to the industry. If you are interested in becoming a member, please visit the PCI-SIG Web site at www.pcisig.com/membership. PCI-SIG members develop and maintain PCI Express specifications and are actively involved in defining compliance criteria and checklists, as well as other technical enabling collateral.

As an additional and extremely valuable benefit of PCI-SIG membership, members are given the right to receive patent licenses from any other member of our organization with necessary claims of patent embodied within our specifications. These licenses may be limited in scope to an implementation of a particular specification, but must be granted to all members on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. ...


This sounds similar but a little different from the JEDEC patent licensing stuff. (imo)

Afaik Rambus is not a member of the pci-sig and one wonders what barriers to selling their solution for the PHY that gives.

Cheers
Cor