C onventional DRAM architectures have reached their practical upper limit in operating frequency and bus width. Mass-market CPUs operating at over 200 MHz and media processors executing more than 2 GOPs (gigaoperations per second) 1,2 are now in production. Their external memory bandwidth of approximately 500 Mbytes/s cannot meet increasing application demands. In addition, no longer does just the CPU consume the majority of main memory bandwidth. A modern multimedia PC's graphics accelerator, media processor, and system I/O all consume significant memory bandwidth. Efforts to extend conventional DRAMs have included scaling the SDRAM's memory clock from 66-MHz to 100-MHz operation. However this adaptation created numerous system design issues while offering only 33% additional peak bandwidth. This article explores the memory bandwidth scaling problem and then describes our solution, the Direct RDRAM device, which successfully meets multimedia requirements and fits seamlessly into the PC chassis.

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