- VC-RAM
Virtual Channel Random Access Memory (VC-RAM in short, other names such as VC-SDRAM, VCSDRAM, VCDRAM, or VCM) is a proprietary type of
SDRAM that was produced byNEC , but released as an open standard with no licensing fees. VCM creates a state in which the various system processes can be assigned their own virtual channel, thus increasing the overall system efficiency by avoiding the need to have processes share buffer space. This is accomplished by creating different "blocks" of memory, allowing each individual memory block to interface separately with the memory controller and have its own buffer space. The only motherboards ever able to support VC-RAM were for AMD Athlon andIntel Pentium 3 processors. A VC-RAM module is physically similar to a SDR SDRAM memory module, so VC-RAM capable motherboards are also able to use standard SDR SDRAM, but they cannot be mixed together.VC-RAM is faster than SDRAM because it has significantly lower latencies. The technology was a potential competitor of
Rambus orRDRAM because VC-RAM was not nearly as expensive as RDRAM was; however, the technology did not catch on. Instead, NEC accepted dual data rate (DDR) SDRAM as the successor of SDR SDRAM. ["AMD Introduces Evolutionary New Computing Platform, Increasing Memory Data Rate by up to 100 Percent." AMD News Room 2000. October 31, 2000. Advanced Micro Devices. March 19, 2008NEC claims 3% boost in Quake benchmarks with 20% increase in system performance.Fact|date=March 2008
References
External links
* [http://www.crucial.com/kb/answer.asp?qid=3698 Crucial website]
* [http://www.necus.com/companies/2/10778.html NEC Launches 128Mb Virtual Channel Synchronous DRAM]
* [http://www.necel.com/english/news/9711/1802.html NEC Dramatically Improves Computer Performance with New Memory Technology]
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