AMD spurns Rambus, favors PC133

AMD says it heavily favors PC133 and double-data rate synchronous DRAM over Rambus memory for boosting the performance of its new Athlon processors.

Company officials say the initial cost of Rambus is too high. The technology won't become cost-effective until the end of 2000 or 2001. Meanwhile, DDR SDRM will provide equal or better performance bandwidth at a lower price, an official said.

During a presentation on the Athlon processor in Tokyo, AMD showed a slide indicating that 100MHz DDR SDRAM with a standard 64-bit memory bus will provide 1.6GBps of bandwidth, equal to a 400MHz Rambus DRAM running on Rambus' proprietary 16-bit serial bus. DDR SDRAMs with a core frequency of 133MHz will crank memory bandwidth up to 2.1 GBps, according to the company.

More information on AMD's memory architecture plans for Athlon is contained in the story at www.techweb.com .