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Summary

Since everybody appears to concentrate on the extreme, there is plenty of middle ground that is left wide open and here is where moderate latencies can be paired with some reasonable clock speed. As we have established on numerous occasions, CAS latency per se is of rather negligible impact for DDR performance, tRCD, on the other hand is very important and tRP that had almost no impact on performance in SDRAM also becomes a major player.

   

The modules are rated at 2.8V operating voltage and CL2.5, tRCD and tRP will vary with frequency but the modules will not run at tRCD=2. The private label TwinMOS brand components are Mosel-Vitelc chips in disguise

We got our hand on a pair of TwinMOS TwiSTER PC4000 modules that seem to fit into this nitch. For those who have not heard about TwiSTER, it stands for TwinMOS Speed TERrific, and I guess whatever elegance the acronym is supposed to have is lost on me personally but may appeal to others. Quite honestly, though, John Beekley has coughed up associations lately that were a lot worse than that.

Briefly, what we are looking at is a set of two matched DIMMs (my pedantic heart is thrilled every time I am confronted with the need of hand - mating two DIMMs as a pair since the only thing that this tells me is that the manufacturer's quality control must really suck if they have to find two DIMMs that will actually work together), most likely a marketing gig like everywhere else. Each DIMM has a density of 256 MB which is achieved using eight 256 Mbit components in a 32 Mx8 configuration. The components are labeled as TwinMOS with the caveat that TwinMOS is not a DRAM manufacturer to begin with, rather they buy blank components and have them labeled with their own logo. Without actual deprocessing, it is not possible to tell with absolute certainty what die the components are actually based on but we did some high-level tests that suggest that the dies is actually Mosel Vitelic / ProMOS.

The modules are rated as PC4000, which translates into a DDR500 or 250 MHz clock rating. In order to warrant functionality at that speed, the modules require 2.8V, which is at the upper margin of the JEDEC specifications.

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