AMD's Huff puffs DDR at memory love-in

Chip contender AMD is a Rambus licensee but is still showing reluctance to demo products that use this memory technology.

Instead, at a DDR love fest held in California earlier this week, AMD and a heap of other industry players, not including Intel, were putting their weight behind DDR as a solution. This is not to say Intel doesn't love DDR too - it finds that it has to, like it or not. There is a difference between love and like, after all.

At the self-styled DDR SDRAM Summit, senior AMD exec Ron Huff outlined his views on why this type of memory was important, and also showed a roadmap of its 760MP chipset, supporting PC-2100 and PC-1600 DDR memory. Although great big green blocks on a timeline leave a certain ambiguity as to when we will see dual Athlon mobos, the slides indicate that the dual Socket A 266/200MHz bus boards will start to arrive this autumn, and also support both buffered and unbuffered DIMMs.

Huff's slides say that DDR (double data rate) memory are the most cost effective solution, with a manufacturing premium over SDRAM in single figures, declining to nothing over a short period of time. Its high bandwidth, low latency characteristics increase performance for typical applications.

There's no word as to whether third party manufacturers will support the two-way solutions. But can you possibly doubt it?

You can find slides from Huff and other DDR puffers at this place, once you register. ®