Rambus is a company that appears among the news now and then, but after its short session on the PC market where Intel used the company’s Rambus technology with its high performance Pentium 4 platforms the number of new products have been few. Rambus has developed several interesting technologies though and keeps developing new ones, but hasn’t been able to penetrate the market again. It has several law suits going where Rambus accused several DDR memory manufactures of hindering Rambus on the PC market. One of the suits has been finished and resulted in a $306 million settlement from memory manufacturer Hynix.
If the company’s progress in the court room has anything to do with its future plans is hard to say, but it at least has high hopes for its latest memory technology XDR2. The technology has been specially designed for graphics circuits and considering that the predecessor, XDR, was used by Sony and PlayStation 3 there should be some potential with the new technology. The intention is thus integrated graphics memory and hopes it will be easier to get back on to the market this way. Whether Rambus will succeed or not remains to be seen, but the competition is not convinced.
“But not everybody in the industry is optimistic about Rambus abilities to return to the PC space. Jon Kang, senior vice president for the technical marketing group at Samsung Semiconductor, believes that XDR will remain mostly a niche product.”
Source: X-bit Labs
