Originally posted by BigGun
I thought Rambus - rdram- was actually faster ram. But then again I am not a tech guy & could be wrong.
It’s available in three different speeds—600 MHz, 700 MHz, and the fastest and costliest version at 800 MHz. It may seem like 800 MHz RDRAM would be six times faster than 133 MHz SDRAM, but this is not true, since the true measure of the capabilities of RAM is not just its frequency, but also factors like bandwidth, latency, etc.
The number of "lanes" differs between different memories. SDRAM has a 64-bit bus width. This means that at 133 MHz, its bandwidth stands at 1.064 GB/sec (64x133/8). In contrast, RDRAM has a 16-bit bus width but runs at 800 MHz giving it a theoretical bandwidth of 1.6 GB/sec (16x800/8). Thus, these figures show that RDRAM will not work all that fast compared to SDRAM.
