From h0db on Yahoo:
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I doubt that Micron and Infineon can even make money on RDRAM if it drops to the $70 level for 128MB. There is a
die penalty for the current generation of DRAM; if earnings are marginal on DDR-SDRAM at the curren price (about
$50-60 for 128MB) I think that the Japanese and Koreans pull the rug out from under Micron and Infineon.
Both Korea and Japan are benefiting from a historically strong dollar--in effect, their exports of DRAM are subsidized.
Micron's plants are all in the USA, as far as I know, and Infineon's plants are in Germany and the US.
TeamDDR is running into a real wall here. They've got very marginal acceptance by the big PC makers--you can buy a
DDR PC online from MicronPC, HP, and Compaq, but you can't buy one in a retail store, and you can't get a managed,
enterprise PC.
What Intel is doing right now is catching AMD and TeamDDR in a vice. They are cutting P-4 prices to the point where
AMD is going to have to slash just to hang onto market share. AMDroids need to face it--benchmarks are all well and
good, but if AMD could sell their offerings for prices close to their performance peers in the Intel line, they would be
doing it.
Intel's advantage is a new core that has tremendous headroom (10GHz with a couple of die-shrinks), and great platform
stability. If you buy or build a P-4 system or a P-3 system with an Intel chipset-based motherboard, it will work right out
of the box with WinMe, Win2K, or Linux.
If you buy or build an AMD system using a VIA, AMD,ALi, or SiS chipset-based motherboard, you have issues. The
hard drive controller is buggy and requires a BIOS flash, and even then (I'm talking about the VIA southbridge) is may be
incompatible with the Soundblaster Live! card--the most popular audio in PCs today. You need to patch your operting
system, and you need to be aware of issues surrounding video card drivers. A geek site building a PC for benchmarking
is NOT comparable to the average computer buyer trying to manage a PC.
Intel is betting that their platform will win. The average consumer will see 1.7GHz (and very soon, 2.0GHz) and 800MHz
memory and compare that $1,300 system to one from AMD, and it will be a no-brainer. The Japanese and Koreans will
have a lock on the only profitable memory type in production. The more TeamDDR tries to spark DDR adoption by
slashing prices, the more they will keep SDRAM prices depressed, which in turn will drag down DDR prices. This does
not sound like a winning formula for AMD or TeamDDR.
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