Rambus Shows off 1200MHz RDRAM

Judging by the response to a Rambus article I wrote last October , most of the THG faithful grit their teeth at the very mention of the company. Certainly there is much to be said about the company's business practices and the fact that we were all initially told that we wouldn't be able to move up to a P4 without embracing the company's (at the time) extremely expensive RIMMs. You have to say one thing for Rambus, however, they seem to stick to their roadmaps. At the Rambus Developer Forum last October, the company promised RDRAM at 1200MHz in 2002 and, barely a few weeks into the year, here it is. Yesterday, Rambus was demonstrating a PC running 1200MHz RDRAM memory at the Platform Conference in San Jose, California. The platform being shown is an overclocked PC with RDRAM running at 1200MHz and sporting a peak bandwidth of 4.8GB/s. The RDRAM roadmap includes adding speed bins at 1066 MHz and 1200MHz without changes to the RDRAM design or industry infrastructure and the RDRAM memory components used for the demonstration are devices directly off a high volume 800MHz production line.