The introduction of Rambus' XDR2 technology is directly aimed at the GDDR5 competition. The previous week a XDR2 based test system was shown that was working with an efficient frequency of 7.2 GHz. Regardless of the very high data transfer rate such a system is said to require 40 percent less energy than a comparable GDDR5 system.

"Future graphics and multi-core processors require significantly higher memory performance under extremely challenging power and thermal constraints. This technology demonstration highlights the outstanding power efficiency of the XDR and XDR2 memory architectures at performance levels from 3.2 to 7.2Gbps with scalability to well over 10Gbps,” said Martin Scott from Rambus.

Rambus doesn't give any specific numbers for the real bandwidth of the test system but the new technology is said to deliver twice the amount of GDDR5. Xbitlabs.com dares to compare the systems: Today's GDDR5 VRAM is, like on modern Radeon graphics cards, connected with an 256 Bit interface and works with effective clock speeds of 1,950 MHz - the bandwidth can reach up to 128.80 GByte per second. The demonstrated XDR2 technology with effective 7.2 GHz would reach about 115 GByte with a 128 bit interface, but with 256 bit even 230 GByte per second would be possible.