De mannen van GamePC hebben een informatief stukje geschreven over verschillende snelle geheugenstandaarden. In het stukje wordt aandacht geschonken aan DDR, QDR en Rambus geheugen. Daarnaast wordt kort ingegaan op de verschillende front side bussen die gebruik van dit geheugen moeten maken. In het artikel wordt kort uitgelegd hoe al deze verschillende soorten geheugen werken en wat je er theoretische mee kan. Aangezien de meeste mensen langzamerhand zullen weten hoe DDR en Rambus geheugen werkt kun je hieronder een stukje vinden over QDR geheugen :
Quad Data Rate (QDR) is the obvious evolution from DDR, at least in terms of naming convention. RAM companies including Cypress Semiconductor, IDT and Micron has been actively pursuing QDR specifications along with JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council). JEDEC is the one that specifies naming conventions in order to help standardize electronics devices. These companies' current focus is on QDR SRAMs (Static RAM), and it appears that what is being called QDR, may really be more akin full-duplex DDR. Current data sheets from IDT, show that their QDR SRAMs are capable of simultaneously writing and reading data in a DDR manner.
These SRAMs (whose current primary purpose is for high-speed telecom switches) are capable of moving data in and out exactly like DDR. However, the I/O ports are completely independent of each other meaning, it can perform a write even while reading. This dual-ported architecture is quite different from current system RAM designs where read or write operations can take place, but not at the same time.
The biggest obstacle with integrating this style of memory architecture is creating the memory controller. Especially with an asynchronous I/O interface such as the one presented with these RAMs, the current approach of designing memory controllers would have to change. With many companies struggling to get DDR up and running and many other still optimizing their SDRAM-based designs, this may take a while.