Rambus (RMBS)

[cordob]

Hey Threejack, on XDR in cellphones:

Given Mr. Gates remarks this week about music and email delivery to cell phones, and the announced cross-licensing between Toshiba and Microsoft, what do you think the chances XDR finds its way into these devices in a few years?

As this application does not require extraordinary memory bandwidth, there could be three reasons left to use XDR:
1) small granularity of memory size, one memory chip can give you 64 MB of memory.
2) low power
3) low price

If 2 or 3 happened versus other solutions, preferably both, I would give it a chance. Granularity they seem to cope in up-market phones now OK, even with smaller memories than 64 MB.

In the smaller phones they have tended to use MCPs (Multi Chip Packages) with flash memory and sram stacked, later with flash, sram and dram stacked. There was a preference for flash and sram stacking as teh interface is very similar and they can share many connections, such as address lines. That advantage would not exist for XDR as the control bus would transport the addresses.

I would say the likelihood of XDR getting into cellphones is even lower than it getting into mainstream PCs.

Cheers
Cor