San Jose Eric Chang, VIA's director of product marketing, raised a few eyebrows when he described Rambus as a "wonderful technology", before hurriedly going on to qualify his remark by pointing out that it was so damn difficult to actually make it work that most manufacturers had simply given up the struggle and gone down the DDR route.

At the Platform Conference in San Jose, Chang extolled the virtues of DDR SDRAM, saying that it was 'low risk and cost effective'. He said the main growth area for memory in the next few years was in the server area, where 1GB memories were rapidly becoming commonplace.

The thinly veiled implication here was that Rambus was simply too expensive to allow it to be used in large memory configurations.

A key advantage of DDR for companies like VIA is that one controller can support both SDR and DDR memory. Controllers could be produced as either SDR or DDR as the market demanded, he said.

"DDR will continue to be the best choice for performance systems for at least the next three years," he concluded. ®