Back in the day, Rambus had a larger "pipeline" than available memory, it was serial and not parallel (which I believe was the reason for the terminators or continuity rimms). The processor wasn't what needed the Rambus, it was the chipset. The chipset was optimized to get maximum throughput from the cpu to the RAM, memory back in the day was slow, rambus was far faster than the current technology that was available. People didn't want to pay the money for Rambus, so intel brouht the 845 that supported P4 cpus but it was dog slow, then they revised the 845 to support DDR, which was still kind of slow but better. Rambus ran at either 400mhz FSB or 533mhz FSB, SDRAM ran at 133mhz, and DDR at I believe 266mhz, remember this was the 1st gen stuff, now there are a ton of new chipsets out there. They only made one chipset, well, kinda, I850 and I850E (socket 478) that supported Rambus. Ok, I guess they also made the I840 but it was for PIII's and rambus, but slower, PC600, PC700 Rambus. There was also one other revision to the 850E that supported the screaming PC1066 Rambus, which, let me tell you, still beats current computers with a 3.06mhz hyperthreading CPU. I ran my system for 4 years, I had it maxed out with a socket 423 2.0ghz (hard to find and super rare) with 1GB of ECC pc800 Rambus, It was as stable as anything, I never had freeze ups, it ran noticeably faster than any friends of mine that had faster cpu's with DDR ram. But alas, like any technology, its outdated, I now have ECC DDR400 with a 3.4 prescott (1MB cache) which runs fast, but is not as stable as my Rambus machine. I like to think of Rambus as memory built for speed while DDR is just overclocked SDRAM, I know it is much better than it used to be. That was my little conspirecy theory at least.
