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A video data stream can move only as fast as the slowest component in its path. Today, video users are finding that insufficient memory bandwidth is damming up the flow of video information. To break this dam, start-up company MoSys developed a memory architecture called MultiBank.
In Multibank, small, independent 256-Kb banks of DRAM are on a single chip. This results in faster speed and shorter latency times, which company officials claim gives MultiBank DRAMs 10(MDRAMs) a peak bandwidth of 660 MBps with 15-nanosecond or less access times. MoSys officials say that the MDRAM average throughput is 500 percent faster than standard DRAM and 250 percent faster then Rambus's high-speed DRAM.
MoSys officials also state that MDRAM's granular architecture makes it ea
sy to produce customized MDRAMs of a particular size, so that graphics-card producers can buy only the memory they need for a given resolution rather then having to buy more DRAM than the resolution requires. For example, with conventional DRAM, you must have 4 MB of RAM to support 1024- by 768-pixel resolution with 24-bit color. The actual amount you need is 2.4 MB of RAM, and, with MDRAM, that's exactly how much you'd get.
MoSys's vice president of marketing, Gary Banta, claims that they now have agreements with S3, Trident Microsystems, and Tseng Laboratories for use of MDRAM. Jim Handy, director and principal analyst with market-research house DataQuest, is not as optimistic about MDRAM's future as its proponents are. According to Handy, numerous solutions that address the memory-bandwidth problem, such as Mitisubhi's 3D with internal processing, cache DRAM, and EDO (extended data out) DRAM, will compete with MDRAM.
MoSys Offers Better Memory for Video
