World's Fastest Memory (DRAM) coming in December

Elpida Memory, Inc. and Rambus Inc. revealed the industry's fastest dynamic random access memory (DRAM), the 512 Megabit (Mb), 4.8GHz XDR DRAM, based on Rambus XDR memory architecture. This latest addition to the XDR DRAM family provides an industry-leading data transfer rate of 9.6 Gigabytes per second (GB/s) with a single device, making it an ideal choice for high-performance, high-volume applications such as personal computers, gaming consoles, servers, workstations and HDTV. The new RAM will be available for sampling in December 2007 and will be shipping in quantities in April 2008.

"The industry’s demand for memory bandwidth in next-generation products is growing rapidly as high-definition image data becomes more popular," said Yoshitaka Kinoshita, officer for the Digital Consumer Division of Elpida Memory, Inc. "Working with Rambus on XDR DRAM, we can provide the most cost-effective, high-bandwidth memory solution to our customers."

Elpida Memory is one of Japan's leading suppliers of DRAM. Its 512Mb, 4.8GHz XDR DRAM device is organized in 8-banks (x16/x8/x4 programmable), and with a 9.6GB/s data transfer rate delivers six times the peak bandwidth of industry-standard DDR2-800 memory devices, i.e. it requires six DDR2-800 x16 devices to achieve an equivalent data rate. The 4.8GHz XDR device is manufactured using Elpida's 70 nm process technology. [Bill Fox]