Somebody should think about staging an actual I/O race among some of the solid-state disk companies, because almost all of them claim to have the fastest gun in the west for new mobile devices.
Maybe The Station will organize some kind of controlled speed-off competition between proud and dignified companies such as Samsung, SanDisk, Western Digital, Intel-Micron, Seagate and others. Might be fun.
Anyway, Rambus is a company to watch when it comes to speeding up data flow. This small Los Altos, Calif.-based company on Feb. 8 introduced its new Mobile XDR memory architecture aimed at next-generation mobile devices.
Mobile XDR memory offers a high-bandwidth yet low-power memory architecture. This new design enables significant cost savings for SoC [system-on-a-chip] chips by offering pin-count reduction and a smaller interface. Power reduction is achieved through a substantial decrease in active power coupled with fast transition times to power-saving modes.
This enables system designers to minimize memory subsystem power to increase battery life across a wide range of applications — from basic voice transmission to multimedia, such as stereoscopic 3D HD video.
The Mobile XDR memory architecture aims to enable future mobile memory platforms to achieve throughputs of up to 4.3Gbp/s per pin with power efficiency. Thus, SoC platforms can achieve more than 17GB/s of memory bandwidth from a single Mobile XDR DRAM device, Rambus claimed.
Key components of the Mobile XDR memory architecture include Mobile XDR DRAM, Mobile XDR memory controller PHY (MIO), and the Mobile XDR memory controller (MXC).
The Mobile XDR memory architecture is currently available for licensing. For additional information, go here.