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From: "James C. McCormick" <jcmccorm@ro.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video
Subject: Re: WRAM vs VRAM
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 17:23:53 -0600
Organization: Intergraph Corporation
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References: <1996Mar20.181644.23819@jarvis.cs.toronto.edu> <4is2h9$8hj@milo.mcs.anl.gov> <3151DC68.4A16@cris.com>
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I'd like to settle a few things on this thread.

As someone else posted, Intergraph OEMs the Matrox Millenium 
graphics card. We also designed their chip onto several of our 
motherboards. Therefore, to date, Matrox is the only chip vendor 
to use WRAM. Trident has one that supports VRAM *or* WRAM but I 
believe that they are using only VRAM now.

WRAM is definitely faster than VRAM. At a minimum, the page mode 
cycle time is faster (20ns vs 35ns). Scrolling and well-aligned 
blits do much better with WRAM than with VRAM. As far as 
benchmarks go, like Winbench, WRAM and VRAM are not much 
different; it's all in the controller.

As far as pricing, I don't have data in from of me that verifies 
that WRAM is cheaper. If it is, it's probably packaging. It takes 
only one chip to make 1MB of WRAM but it takes 4 chips to make the 
same for VRAM (assuming 2Mb VRAMs which are the most common).

Also, don't expect WRAM to have a long life. Rambus may pop up in 
a couple of places, mostly for low end cards. The bus is too 
narrow (8 bits/chip) to do much with 16bit or 24bit per pixel. My 
bet is on SDRAM.

My 0.02.

Cary

PS I don't know where the 1.6GB/s came from. Someone else 
corrected it already though; fill rate is 200MB/s.