Double DDR technology gets shown off

Intel Developer Forum Kentron Technologies plans to demo its QBM (Quad Band Memory) technology at IDF. It reckons the technology doubles the data transfer rate between the processor and main memory, by doubling the bandwidth available.

The company says that any application that suffers from a memory bottleneck would benefit from its technology, from network servers to consumer wireless applications.

So what is it, and how does it work? Basically, they've strapped two DDR SDRAM devices together and run them a quarter of a cycle apart. One is synchronised with the processor clock, and the other a quarter of a cycle later.

The nifty part is getting all the data through the bus, which they do with a field effect transistor (FET) which operates like a switch to pack data from both banks along the bus.

The effect? Four bits of data per clock cycle, double what you get out of a normal DDR device. Can we call it DDDR, or is that getting silly. ®