Computer science was always in the front rows of science fields that achieve fastest growing speeds. But it seems to me that this days computing on the go outpaces computing on the couch. Every now and then you can stumble on a press release that says that someone cut processing time here and double bandwidth there. And now there is Elpida Memory – the company that made its name designing memory modules for all types of computers out there. The latest gadget from them is a 2-Gigabit DDR2 memory module for mobile devices.In fact, 2-Gigabit (!) mobile RAM bandwidth is probably not the most important characteristic of the latest unit. This could be done by, say, overclocking an old one. But it would be a mess and won’t work properly, would it? What Elpida did is smartly used their 50nm CMOS. This allowed them to achieve speeds up to 800Mbps while keeping power consumption down low. If we put the latest Elpida stick head to head with an average one that is as fast, the last one would use half as much again (1.8V) as Elpida’s 1.2V.
I have started it by saying that speed is not at the top of the heap here. The thing is that there always is a bottleneck somewhere. In mobile devices whether we take smartphones or PMPs, processor is not fast enough, and what’s more important, a very complex OS itself can be a tie. In PCs it’s usually the hard drive. Back to mobile phones and handhelds, 2-Gigabit speed will really shine in a tandem with one of those latest application processors.
