SAN JOSE -- Elpida Memory Inc. is backing all major DRAM architectures right now: SDRAM, double-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM, and Rambus Inc. But executives from the Japanese company believe that SDRAMs and DDR SDRAMs will leave Rambus' RDRAMs in the dust over time.
Elpida--a joint DRAM venture between Japan's Hitachi Ltd. and NEC Corp.--claims that the majority of its DRAM shipments are based on the SDRAM architecture right now.
The DDR SDRAM and RDRAM products each represent 15% of the company's shipments right now, said Mike Despotes, president and chief executive of Elpida's U.S. subsidiary, Elpida Memory (USA) Inc., based in Santa Clara, Calif.
But that will change. The company's DDR SDRAMs are poised to surpass its RDRAMs in terms of unit shipments by early-2002, Despotes said. "That will likely be in the first quarter of 2002," he said in an interview.
"Rambus is out and doing reasonably well," Depotes said. "But RDRAM shipment rates will decline," he said.
One of the reasons for this is Intel Corp.'s sudden support for DDR SDRAMs. At present, Intel's Pentium 4 processor line only supports RDRAMs.
But Intel plans to support competitive memory architectures as well. For example, Intel is currently sampling Brookdale, a chip set that supports SDRAMs for the Pentium 4 processor line. And early next year, Intel's Pentium 4-based chip sets will support DDR SDRAM.
As a result, the prospects are bright for DDR SDRAM--at least at Elpida. The company's overall output of SDRAM and DDR SDRAM will reach parity by the second half of 2002, Depotes said.
In fact, the prices for SDRAM and DDR SDRAM are nearly equal right now, he said. "DDR prices have gone down rapidy," he said. "There's only a small delta between SDRAM and DDR," he added.
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