Playstation 3 accounts for almost 90% of XDR memory shipments

Los Altos (CA) - Driven by Sony’s Playstation 3, Rambus said that memory manufacturers have shipped more than 25 million memory devices based on the firm’s XDR technology.

Based on current estimates that Sony has sold about 5.5 million PS3s to date and the fact that the console uses four 512 Mbit XDR devices suggests that about 22 million XDR units have made their way into this product. Samsung and Elpida are the main XDR memory suppliers for the PS3.

Rambus did not provide further specific products, which are using XDR devices today, but mentioned that the technology "ideally suited for graphics processing, consumer electronics, network and server applications, as well as a new generation of compute platforms driven by multi-core processors."

While we know that especially Cell-processor based server and workstation systems integrate XDR memory, it is unclear which role the memory will play in other high-performance computing applications such as graphics and stream processing. The fact that Rambus is the only technology source and indications that AMD and Nvidia are jumping from GDDR3 to GDDR4 and GDDR5, suggests that Rambus will have a tough time getting the technology adopted by this market segment. iSuppli analyst Nam Kim, however, believes that XDR "could lend itself to future graphics-intensive applications such as HDTV."

Currently available XDR devices run with up to 4 GHz, providing a peak memory bandwidth of 8.0 GB/s. Rambus said that XDR will scale to 8.0 GHz and 16 GB/s bandwidth.