To Add Speed, Chipmakers TUNE Structure
IBM, Intel, and AMD are finding ways around the physical problems that have hampered their efforts to make chips faste

To understand the quest to build ever faster and more powerful computers, it's helpful to understand the problems that hold them back from getting faster in the first place.

While chips themselves are getting faster all the time, faster is a relative term. Even though chipmakers like Intel (INTC) and IBM (IBM) are building more powerful chips every 12 to 18 months, other chips that go inside a computer haven't historically KEPT up in the performance race. If you think of a microprocessor as a fast-talking, fast-moving dynamo that never takes long to get anything done, then a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chip is a bit more of a loafer, forcing the processor to wait for it before it can get on with the task at hand. Worse, between them lies a narrow hallway that tends to get crowded EASILY, and when it does, work piles up.

If it all [highlight]sounds a little like a discarded plot for a Dilbert cartoon[/highlight], you're not very far from the truth. The solution could come STRAIGHT from the playbook of the pointy-headed manager, but with one key difference: It works brilliantly. The solution is to first make the slowpoke move a lot faster, but then to put them both in the same office so they can work more closely together with nothing to get in the way.
Combo Chips

That's a simple way to describe the disclosure of a new approach to computer chip design unveiled by IBM on Feb. 14 at the International Solid State Circuits Conference, a chip technology event in San Jose, Calif. IBM calls the approach eDRAM—the "e" stands for "embedded"—and says that combining the two types of chip onto a single piece of silicon will substantially improve processor performance. IBM plans to integrate this technique into its chips beginning in 2008.

By embedding DRAM DIRECTLY onto the processor, IBM will be able to eliminate another type of memory that's usually embedded onto a processor called SRAM, or static random access memory, which is typically faster than DRAM, and acts as a go-between between the DRAM and the processor. However, SRAM takes up a lot of space on a processor, and with chips getting smaller all the time, the change frees up a lot of valuable space.

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http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2007/tc20070215_001491.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_technologyeDRAM is already used in some cases.
Either the PS3 or the XBox 360 use 10Mb of embedded DRAM for graphics.Cool. Just cool. I love it.