The long-term successor of DDR memory will be DDR-II. The specifications of DDR-II are not finalized, but it will doubtless use newer memory technologies to give DDR memory less latency and more bandwidth in order to keep DDR competitive in the long term. One chart we have from NEC shows DDR-II being built in the second half of 2001 at speeds of 200MHz DDR (400MHz equivalent) to 250MHz DDR. Eventually, the technology should reach 300MHz DDR.

Our hands-on experience with RDRAM has had mixed results. On the one hand, we see it as the quickest path to bringing extremely high memory bandwidth to the desktop. The i840 platform provides 3.2GBps of memory bandwidth, far more than DDR1600 and 2100 provide, and has been available since last year. We see no reason why motherboard makers could not bring four-channel RDRAM to the mainstream and eight-channel RDRAM to the workstation/server arena.

Also, Intel's first RDRAM platforms, the i820 and i840, have little performance advantage over their SDRAM brethren. This is likely mostly due to the 100 and 133MHz FSB of the Pentium III choking off most of the advantage of fast memory. It may also be due to Intel being new to RDRAM technology and not knowing quite the best way to optimize RDRAM chipsets. Either way, we expect the first major showdown between DDR SDRAM and RDRAM to come when Intel has shipped both their RDRAM and DDR SDRAM Pentium 4 chipsets. At that point, with two solutions for the Pentium 4 from Intel, we will be able to see which memory can provide the most performance on equal footing.