PC1066 RDRAM vs. DDR SDRAM

Brad wrote into send us his "Comparison of PC1066 RDRAM vs DDR SDRAM. Quote - RDRAM is considerably more expensive that DDR SDRAM, and up until now the 100MHz PC800 specification didn't do well in comparison. Just recently 133MHz PC1066 was launched, and is now officially supported by the new Intel P4 and the Intel 850E core logic chipset, but this time promises to bring memory performance to the next level."

Phew!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering what was going to come along to give PC/OS manufacturers an excuse to charge more for a PC, and here it is!

No doubt XP2 will require a 4ghz cpu, 2 gigs of this new ram, different coloured motherboard, maybe firewire2, superDUPER ata 9 million IDE etc etc...

I`m stopping at my current machine. Linux presumably doesnt need all this crap to do the same stuff its done up until now without it. What do we need more power for anyway? Games? Is that it? What other aspect of PC`s needs accelerating now? I thought the weak link was internet bandwidth?

5% is "Thrashing"?

[jigokukoinu]

Of all the tests done between these two, about a 5% improve was the most that the PC1066 had. How exactly does about a 5% improve justify the (previously true, now perhaps perceived) significant increase in price?

It ALMOST sounds like someone *COUGHRDRAMMAKERSCOUGH* was "supporting" the writer of that article, their adjectives were too strong for the data.

-Jeremiah

What about interleaving

[nrosier]

I still don't get what the deal is with all this Mhz....
Why can't they just do interleaving (call it stripping/RAID-0 for memory)? No need to crank up those Mhz's, but spread the load over a couple of DIMM's. Most large systems (at least Sun I know off) still use 100Mhz or so DIMM's but do 8-way interleaving (maybe even higher) to get their high memory bandwidths.
The market seems to be demanding higher Mhz's and seems to forget there's other stuff involved. Just look at IBM's Power4, Sun's UltraSparcIII etc... Lower Mhz's (or Ghz's) but with a big level-2 cache and by using SMP they're able to beat whatever Intel/AMD system you put them up against.