Tech
Five years ago: SGRAM is latest threat to VRAM supremacy
Now that the UK market has got used to seeing WRAM, SDRAM and Rambus DRAM, UK distributor Sunrise Electronics wants us to learn another technology, Synchronous Graphics RAM (SGRAM)
Milton Keynes-based Sunrise claims that NEC's latest 8Mbit SGRAM offers considerably more bandwidth than synchronous DRAM at up to 400MB/sec, but is cheaper to manufacture than dual-ported VRAM.
"We expect SGRAM to go into PCs and workstations for multimedia graphics," said Roy Kirsopp, managing director of Sunrise. "I think there'll be some thinning out of the technologies but during 1997 we certainly expect synchronous architectures to be where VRAM is now."
ATI last week began shipping SGRAM on its Xclaim 3D and Rage 3D graphics cards, while 3D Labs also began offering SGRAM on its Permedia line.
Sunrise can be contacted by telephone on 01908-263999.