I have searched online and I did not find a single answer about this question.
I know that the numbers after PC reprsent the bandwidth of the RAM memory module, but my question is what do the letters P and C stand for in this naming convention.
3 Answers
PC100 was created by Intel in an attempt to standardize new Sychronous DRAM. They never defined what PC meant. JEDEC, that standards organization then ran with it when it created PC66 and PC133 standards. They also did not define what PC meant. Once the market took off, everyone continued to use PC for newer memory types like DDR DDR2, etc.
As it stands, only old Intel engineers involved in creating the standard would know.
To hazard a guess, it literally means PC as in ram for personal computers, it could mean Precharged, a common state or requirement in SDRAM, or it could mean Pipelined Clocking, as SDRAM had the benefit of pipelining over asynchronous DRAM. Pipelining means it can start a new command before it is done processing the old command. Essentially command buffering.
I'm fairly certain the PC is just Personal Computer that got carried over from Intel's original PC133 standard.
The Objective given in the Intel standard states (emphasis mine):
The objective of this document is to define a new Synchronous DRAM specification (“PC SDRAM”) which will remove extra functionality from the current JEDEC standard SDRAM specification, so that it will be a “fully compatible” device among all vendor designed parts. It should be easy to design and manufacture and highly cost optimized for the main stream volume desktop Intel architecture PCs.
The most plausible-sounding answer I found was that it means "pipeline clock" from a similar discussion on Tom's Hardware.
