Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3208

All about the i-RAM

by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 25, 2005 4:31 PM EST


My i-RAM article is live. It's a lot later than expected, but I had to wait for a few more responses from Gigabyte in Taiwan before putting it live.

The i-RAM we reviewed is the shipping version of the card, which differs in a few ways from what we talked about at Computex. The biggest difference? The i-RAM will retail for $150, not $50 as mentioned at Computex. A big part of the price difference is the initial 1K run of the product; if Gigabyte ramped up production significantly, and transitioned away from using a FPGA to a custom IC for the board, that cost could be brought down significantly. But they'd have to ship a lot of i-RAM boards to justify producing their own IC for these things, and they won't ship a lot without a lower price, and so on and so forth.

The card is pretty cool, honestly the one thing that floors me every time is how quickly you can copy files around on it. I know it's just RAM and it's actually slow as far as memory-to-memory copies, but in Windows all you see is a drive letter, and copying at ~100MB/s is just something I'm not used to on a normal computer.

I'm not sure what I'd do with an i-RAM in my personal system, but if I could fit 8GB or more on one (or RAID two together) then I start having a few ideas of what I could do.

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