Cell Processor Uses Rambus High Speed Interface Solutions 215

On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 16:05:33 -0800, "Jeremy Williamson"

Despite my rather distaste for Rambus the company and recognizing that their technology just doesn't fit into the PC realm, for the PS2 and the PS3 their stuff makes VERY good sense.

With the way that the PS2 processor and this new Cell processor work, combined with the nature of the machine (ie to play games), bandwidth is likely to be quite important while latency will be somewhat less so. Remember that these processors are going to be doing a lot of work traditionally buttociated with GPUs in a PC. Rambus' solutions, both XDR now and RDRAM back when the PS2 was new, do offer VERY high per-pin bandwidth and that's just the sort of thing that these consoles need. The processors also have integrated memory controllers which helps avoid some of the potential issues with Rambus in PCs. To top it off, the memory chips are getting soldered right onto the system board rather than hanging off multidrop sockets on the system board.

Basically a PC and the PS2-PS3 have rather different designs and different requirements. Hmm.. different solutions for different

------------- Tony Hill