Sorry if this post is a little warbly. I'm pretty sleepy now as I write it.

A typical computer processor speed these days is something like the low to mid 3000 megahertz. Mine's a 3.2Ghz, for example. As you may already know, that means in one second, my computer is capable of performing 3.2 billion calculations. That might be 3.2 billion additions every second, for example. In an ideal world, we could just keep making CPUs faster and faster, and thus end up having better and better computer performance, however there's a reason this isn't what happens in practice.

Typical RAM speed these days is only like 400 megahertz, or 8 times slower than my CPU. That means if I actually wanted to add two numbers together, what would probably happen is first the CPU tries to read the first number. Then it has to wait for 7 operations, while the RAM supplies it (1 read op, plus 7 "do nothing" ops = 8 ops). Finally the first number arrives. Now it wants to read the second number. After 16 operations from the beginning, it will have read in both numbers, and can now perform the additon, for a total of 17 operations. That means while the computer could have been doing 3.2 billion calculations per second, only 1 out of 17 of those operations count as "useful" work. So really, my CPU could only do about 3.2×10⁹÷17&x00f8;188 million calculations per second. That's the performance of a 0.2 Ghz computer chip.

In practice, computer engineers have done some clever tricks so that a 3.2GHZ chip does significantly outperform a 0.2Ghz chip, but they're starting to run out of tricks, which is why you might have notice Intel and AMD playing down their product's clock frequencies. It was considered too confusing to explain to consumers why their latest chips are "harder, better, faster, stronger" and yet the clock speed isn't increasing (in fact, they very well may be decreasing). Nowadays it's all about 64 bit processors and dual-core or multi-core chips.

I won't be getting into what 64 bit processors or dual core chips are in this posting. This is just to explain why your CPU's clockspeed is no longer the limiting factor in perforamance: The CPU is just too damn fast, and making it faster will only result in it waiting for your other components anyway. That is, until 2007.

Toshiba is planning to sell new XDR DRAM chips, which run at 4.8Ghz. That's the first time I've ever heard of RAM being faster than CPU! They plan on selling 512MB chunks by the second half of 2005. However, since these chips will certainly require new motherboard standards (standards that don't even exist yet, at the time of writing), which means you probably won't see these chips in your desktop this year.

Toshiba doesn't expect this RAM to be used in mainstream desktop computers until 2007. However, you still have a chance to get your hands on this tech before then: XDR RAM will be used in the Playstation 3.