In November of last year, Rambus announced The Terabyte Bandwidth Initiative in which they stated they were going after, well, a terabyte of bandwidth. They have been making progress and recently showed off some working silicon.
Rambus is looking to provide the architecture that will be needed for tomorrow’s hungry graphics processors. They plan to achieve the goal by using 32x Data Rate technology, differential memory and FlexLink, a scalable, point-to-point command/address link. They’re calling the speed boost an order of magnitude greater than current systems. Considering that the PS3 has about 50 GB/s, I’m not one to disagree.
If you want to know all the fine details about what all of this means, check it out, here. Either way, we’re still at least a few years off from seeing this show up.