Most has lately thought of RDRAM (Rambus) as a sort of dead end when it comes to the PC-market, but alas, it seems as if a third reincarnation of Rambus is on its way!
Behind this Rambus-reincarnation lie the well-known SiS and Rambus themselves. Rambus follows the stream by supporting the bandwidth hungry P4-processor in SiS’s new chipset, the R659, supporting both 533 and 800 MHz FSB.
The big news is that the memory interface on the SiS R659-chipset is not Dual-Channel as is the now popular Dual-Channel DDR, but rather Quad-Channel. This will with RIMM-4800 memory modules give a theoretical memory capacity of 9.6 GB/s, a rough 50% more than for Intel’s 875P-chipset with a maximum of 6.4 GB/s.
The high latency that RDRAM had to drag with before is also supposed to have been dealt with, especially compared to today’s DDR-SDRAM modules where timings is heightened to give room for higher clock-rates.
To lower the latency further, a small cache has been integrated in the chipset and Rambus claims in documentations that RDRAM will have lower latency than DDR400.
The first release of this chipset will be on the ASUStek board ASUS P4S13G.
If one would believe the numbers given by SiS and Rambus we are talking of a 5-10% increase of performance compared to the 875P-chipset, a very impressive factor.
The numbers seems very promising if serious gamers and ordinary workstations are taken into account when launching the chipset, but we are a bit sceptical to the chipset’s performance considering overclocking.
We will hopefully be able to provide a preview of this within a few weeks. Until then you can satisfy your curiosity by reading of the preview of the chipset here.
At Xbit-labs one can also read more of ASUS SiS R659-mainboards.
