Rival memory makers Toshiba and Elpida yesterday separately announced plans to ship XDR memory chips delivering "industry leading" performance in the second half of the year.

Both said they were currently sampling 512Mb XDR DRAM parts, which operate at 3.2GHz to yield a data transfer rate of 6.4GBps - four times faster than 1.6GHz GDDR and 12 times faster than 533MHz DDR 2, Toshiba said. XDR transfers eight bits of data each clock cycle, four times DDR's two-bit per clock tick rate.

XDR was developed by Rambus for graphics and digital media roles. Both Toshiba and Elpida said they expect to target "digital consumer electronics, network systems and graphic systems" with the new memory chips.

They're not the only memory players pursuing XDR - Samsung commenced mass production of a 256Mb part in January this year.

Toshiba said its chip will clock at up to 4.8GHz effective - the memory clock actually runs at 600MHz - while Elpida listed 4GHz effective (500MHz) at its chip's peak. ®

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