Rambus Weather Report: Partly Sunny; Rambus as buffer memory in work- stations graphics

Electronic News, June 21, 1999 by Peter Brown

San Jose-PixelFusion Ltd., Bristol, U.K., said today that it will be one of the first companies to integrate Rambus DRAM (RDRAM) technology with a graphics accelerator designed for the workstation graphics market.

Many industry observers believe Rambus may find its home in the computer market initially in main memory, but graphics applications are not far behind and may be a better value for OEMs. Based on the price premium of RDRAM and the constrained price pressures of mainstream PCs, Rambus may be more welcome as a value added for the graphics camp.

At least for this year it appears that Rambus will not have much of a place in the DRAM market due to a chipset delay by Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif. After that, Rambus Inc., Mountain View, Calif., along with analysts from Cahners In-Stat Group and Dataquest believe the technology will penetrate the PC market by as much as 50 percent of the total DRAM business. At the beginning of Rambus' lifecycle, however, it will be applicatons such as PixelFusion's add-in card where Rambus may actually invade first.

"If Rambus and its suppliers do what they say they can do, not only will this be a huge boost for graphics developers but every graphics developer will be wanting the technology in their workstation," said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Associates, Tiburon, Calif.

Steve Cullen, principle analyst at Cahners In-Stat Group, agreed saying that with RDRAM it would be easy for a graphics developer to send out one command and start the data coming rapidly. "If you can keep up a steady stream of data you don't have the latency problem people are talking about and you get high efficiency on the bus," said Cullen. This is very important for graphics developers who need fast performance while developing, he added.

"In high-end graphics there is no such thing as too high of a price," said Peddie. "(Workstation OEMs) won't roll over and let you take advantage of them but the are willing to pay for something extra if it helps productivity."

This may be what Rambus is counting on for financial support in the early adoption years of the technology. Not only for PixelFusion's offering but for all of the high-end applications where the high- performance DRAM may be playing. OEMs and customers who may be willing to pay something extra for higher bandwidth will be the target. This may also be a way to differentiate from one workstation OEM to another, said Cullen.

"If you are able to provide a pricey, yet high-performance offering to customers that they want, it could be seen as a different better way to do high-level graphics and customers are more willing to buy that computer," Cullen noted.

How this relates to mainstream PCs, on the other hand, is a different story where the segmented market is all about price and how to drive it down in order to mass-produce PCs while giving them a fast working, high-performance machine.

Robert Pearson, vice president of marketing at PixelFusion, said the initial board from PixelFusion's add-in board development partners will feature a minimum of 128Mbytes of DRAM on the board and up to 1Gbyte. The board will begin at $2,000 and go up from there.

"There are not a lot of applications that will need 1Gbyte of frame buffer memory, but still, there are a few and for those, we will have boards to help them in getting the best performance available through a workstation," said Pearson.

The chip, dubbed the Fuzion 150, is the start-up's initial device and is set to begin shipments in the fourth quarter. PixelFusion plans to combine this chip with the Rambus memory on workstation add-in boards built by a third party. Pearson would not disclose the names of the add-in board companies, or foundries, or OEM, it is working with . The boards are slated to begin shipping in early 2000.

In-Stat's Cullen said the device may be the first four channel product getting a 6,400Mbytes/sec. bandwidth compared to a PC-100 system getting 800Mbytes/sec. bandwidth.