Direct Rambus Samples Roll Out

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

November 12, 1998 (12:00 AM EST)

By Amber Howle,

Resellers should expect to see systems containing Direct Rambus memory by the middle of next year.

In the past two weeks, a few memory vendors have said they have made progress on their Direct Rambus efforts. Some have started in-house testing, while at least one is already shipping samples to PC OEMs.

Toshiba America Electronic Components, in Irvine, Calif., started shipping sample Direct Rambus In-line Memory Modules (RIMM) to Round Rock, Texas-based Dell this week with help from Kingston Technology. Toshiba and Fountain Valley, Calif.-based Kingston formed a manufacturing partnership recently to deliver Toshiba's RIMMs to PC OEMs planning to release systems using the new memory architecture next year.

"[Kingston] is also building prototypes for semiconductor OEMs," said Al Soni, vice president and general manager of services at Kingston. "At this point, it is in the initial engineering phase."

Also on Monday, Siemens' semiconductor group, in Cupertino, Calif., said it has the first functional 72-megabit Direct Rambus DRAM silicon. The company said the chip is the industry's smallest 72-megabit Direct Rambus DRAM part, which can also be used for 64 megabits.

Siemens officials said the chips are being tested now, with engineering samples expected to ship to PC OEMs by the end of the year.

Last week, Samsung Semiconductor, in San Jose, Calif., said it was the world's first to develop a 144-megabit Rambus DRAM chip and 144-megabyte RIMM. The chip is twice as fast as the 72-megabit chip Samsung released in July and can process data up to 1.6 gigabytes per second, making it the world's fastest memory product to date.

"We consider this latest announcement the most important for the Rambus project," said Avo Kanadjian, vice president of memory marketing for Samsung. He said modules based on 128 MB, like Samsung's latest, allow 16 to 256-MB capacities in increments of 16 MB.

Kanadjian said Samsung plans to ship samples to OEMs soon.

Vendors and analysts have said VARs can expect to get their hands on Direct Rambus memory during the second half of next year. Research data from Semico Research, in Phoenix, predicts Direct Rambus memory will capture about 12 percent of the market by 2000, and 20 percent by 2001.

The new memory architecture was developed by Rambus, in Mountain View, Calif., in close conjunction with Intel, of Santa Clara, Calif.