shellofinsanity

Something has been bugging me, why cant we say use GDDR4 as our system ram, i mean thats some crazy bandwith for sure, and also why cant we have a 256 or 512bit mem bus on our boards, i mean GPU's get it, is there some reason GDDR cant be general purpose?

shifty22123

One of the reasons probably is that no system atm can support that bandwidth and not even to mention the speed it has to run at to use such fast ram!

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guyladouche

Yeah--I might not understand it all entirely, but I don't think we're even able to take full advantage of DDR2 (or even DDR) bandwidth with what is done with current machines. I know it depends on the application, but for most things, the CPU is the bottleneck anyway. I know we're already on the way to DDR3, but I'd be more interested in faster throughput CPU's rather than moving on to the "next best thing" in RAM when I won't even be able to use it to it's fullest...

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Mhill2029

Well the main reason why it's not likely to be seen as desktop memory for a few years yet is cost to the consumer.

GDDR3 and GDDR4 accounts for quite a bulk of the overall cost of the GPU, and they don't have anything like we use in system memory.

For example the average today is 2GB Ram....becoming 4GB standard at some point. The cost of 2x1GB of GDDR3 or GDDR4 would be massive

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My Vantage Score

Chozart

Price is indeed an issue.

Check video cards... an 8800GTS 640MB is about $100 more than the 320MB version. $100 for 320MB GDDR3... 2GB would cost $640

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shellofinsanity

i can understand this, but still, the power users would eat it up and even if we stuck to DDR1 why cant we get 450mhz DDR1 modules in our comp? The 5950Ultra had them. What about bus speed, since 1994 mem to cpu bus has been 64ibt, why not 128bit real bus and 256bit dual channel bus?