Apart from its rampant lawsuits, it's rare to catch Rambus' name in the news these days. Even more weird, is that the company's announcement today has little to do with its proprietary XDR DRAM. Instead, Rambus has teamed up with Kingston to develop "threaded memory module technology," which boosts the bandwidth of conventional DDR3 SDRAM.
The technology is implemented in industry-standard DDR3 devices, and utilizes conventional module infrastructure. It enables power savings in systems by partitioning modules into multiple independent channels that share a common command/address port.
Threaded modules support 64-byte (512-bit) memory transfers at full bus utilization, which results in efficiency gains of up to 50% compared to regular DDR3 modules. Additionally, threaded modules are activated half as often, resulting in 20% less power consumption.
The companies are expected to show off the new technology in a "static demonstration" at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week.