Rambus DRAM Part 2: Performance

i840 with SDRAM?

Another interesting addition to our testing lineup is an i840 with SDRAM platform. The board we used for this platform is the Tyan Thunder 2400 which features the i840 chipset, with two MRH-S chips which are essentially what the i840 uses to convert its RDRAM channels to SDRAM channels.

This combination theoretically allows for a peak bandwidth of 1.6GB/s on an SDRAM platform, unfortunately you have to take into the account the extreme performance penalty incurred by the RDRAM to SDRAM translation process that occurs within the MRH-S chips.

Unfortunately the Thunder 2400 is far from the most stable solution and wouldn't even complete some of our test runs, thus it is absent from some of the benchmark comparisons.