To answer the original question: RDRAM tends to be a lot smoother pricing than most other types of memory. It has has a slow and steady price drop over its entire useful life. I don't see any reason that that trend will stop. I watch the prices once a week: RDRAM is maybe a few dollars lower here and maybe a dollar higher there, but basically not much change week by week.
Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Eventually it'll become wicked expensive due to nobody but Sony using it.
Well in addition to Sony, there are always some high end servers still using it...
As memory goes out of style the price slowly drifts lower and lower. Take EDO memory for example. It used to be in all the computers, but it hasn't been in any new computers - not for about 5 years. But EDO memory is still easilly available. EDO memory is even listed on the front page of pricewatch.com. What about the price? In its heyday EDO memory cost about $50 per MB. Then as it was being replaced, it dropped to roughly $25 per MB. What is the price now? You can get 256 MB for $31 shipped.
Do you have any reason to think that RDRAM won't follow all the other out of date memory trends (Assuming it goes out of date)?
But then again, RDRAM may always come back. Intel recently renewed its RDRAM agreement - although Intel has no plans for additional RDRAM chipsets for Northwood, who knows what may come in the future. AMD still has an RDRAM license if and when it needs it. PC1200 is just around the corner with 9.6 GB/sec bandwidth (PC1200 was demonstrated running last January). Rambus's Yellowstone products have been getting some
support for the next generation products. Yellowstone transfers 8 bits of data per clock (four times as mych as DDR's two bits of data per clock). Running at 6.4 GHz, Yellowstone will achieve up to 100 GB/sec of bandwidth. That's 10 times the bandwidth of today's top memory. So maybe RDRAM will die, but at this point it sure has a lot of potential
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