Rambus in Cell

pr0digal jenius · May 6, 2005, 03:04 AM

Rambus just proudly announced that their XDR memory interface would be used in the elusive Cell processor, being announced today at the International Solid State Circuits Society conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.

There's not much surprise that Rambus was selected to be involved with the Cell project, given their previous history with Sony and the Playstation 2, as well as their ability to deliver extremely high bandwidth memory devices on very low pincounts. Sony and Toshiba also signed a licensing agreement back at the start of 2003 to work on the Cell project.

For years Rambus has been telling us that they've been working with GPU manufacturers on getting their high-bandwidth designs into future GPU architectures, and their design win with Sony may just be the key to getting XDR on PC graphics cards as well - especially since NVIDIA handled GPU design for the Playstation 3.

The other interesting part of Rambus' announcement is that they are also responsible for the Cell processor interfaces - it's connection to the outside world (or to other Cell processors). Rambus has had a serial processor bus interface in their IP repertoire for quite some time now, called FlexIO. FlexIO is being used as the processor interface standard for Cell.
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Source/Read More: Anandtech

mike2h · May 6, 2005, 06:27 AM

they are a little behind the times. this has been known since last year. hmm, think it is about time to buy back in.

rgreen83 · May 6, 2005, 02:43 PM

They arent all that far behind, anand posted that article february 7th. This probably came from xbit labs who just posted yesterday too, also noting anands.

May 6, 2005, 03:04 AM	#1
pr0digal jenius Delete Me Join Date: Mar 2004 Posts: 14,648 Rep Power: 0	Rambus in Cell Rambus just proudly announced that their XDR memory interface would be used in the elusive Cell processor, being announced today at the International Solid State Circuits Society conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco. There's not much surprise that Rambus was selected to be involved with the Cell project, given their previous history with Sony and the Playstation 2, as well as their ability to deliver extremely high bandwidth memory devices on very low pincounts. Sony and Toshiba also signed a licensing agreement back at the start of 2003 to work on the Cell project. For years Rambus has been telling us that they've been working with GPU manufacturers on getting their high-bandwidth designs into future GPU architectures, and their design win with Sony may just be the key to getting XDR on PC graphics cards as well - especially since NVIDIA handled GPU design for the Playstation 3. The other interesting part of Rambus' announcement is that they are also responsible for the Cell processor interfaces - it's connection to the outside world (or to other Cell processors). Rambus has had a serial processor bus interface in their IP repertoire for quite some time now, called FlexIO. FlexIO is being used as the processor interface standard for Cell. __________________ Source/Read More: Anandtech

May 6, 2005, 06:27 AM	#2
mike2h DriverHeaven Extreme Member Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: norcal Posts: 6,483 Rep Power: 91 System Specs	they are a little behind the times. this has been known since last year. hmm, think it is about time to buy back in. __________________

May 6, 2005, 02:43 PM	#3
rgreen83 DriverHeaven Addict Join Date: Aug 2003 Posts: 357 Rep Power: 0	They arent all that far behind, anand posted that article february 7th. This probably came from xbit labs who just posted yesterday too, also noting anands.