Q. What is Rambus DRAM?
RDRAM which was developed by Rambus has been adopted by Intel for its Pentium and Itanium processors. It has become main competitor to SDRAM. RDRAM chips are vertical packages with all pins on single side. Chip exchanges data with processor over 28 wires no more than 12 centimetres long. Bus address upto 320 RDRAM chips and is rated at 1.6 GBps.
The special RDRAM bus delivers address and control information employing an asynchronous block-oriented protocol. After an initial 480 ns access time this generates the 1.6 GBps data rate. Speed of RDRAM is because of its high speed Bus. Instead of being controlled by explicit RAS CAS R/W and CE signals used in traditional DRAMs an RDAR gets a memory request over high-speed bus. This request comprises desired address and the type of operation as well as number of bytes in operation.