>>Is Rambus being used in HDTV or something?<<
thunderstorm chased me off the beach and cancelled fishing today again.
mind, you got me thinking with that question. ibm has a similar single chip set top solution.
ibm verified last week that they plan to start drdram production soon. we know it costs 100's of millions of dollars to do that. why is ibm spending all that money? where is the return?
drdrams are going to be available in the market, so they must see a profit in their own drdram production. ibm said at least initially they do not plan to use rambus in low end aptiva's. that is the biggest part of their pc business. they will use drdram in high end pc's and work stations. still does not seem like enough to justify that kind of expenditure. especially in view of how much $ ibm is losing in the pc business. i asked myself what markets does ibm see to justify building out drdram production? i came up with a few.
matsushita's announcement reminded me that ibm announced a single chip solution for set top boxes end of last year. looking into that in jan. i found ibm using arm7 cores (yup, the old armhy again). that got me interested in armhy and is one of the the original reasons i bought that stock. the clincher was bernard super's little talk and explanation in palo alto. then woodside told me she was leaving mips to go with armhy. what a brilliant move that was... i am wandering, sorry. btw i am up 60%+ in rmbs in 9 months and 40%+ in armhy in 6 months, and still buying.
so the question remains, what is ibm going to do with a rambus drdram production facility?
how about this for starters...
high end pc's and work stations as stated.
set top boxes.
blue logic products. the latest ibm asics with arm or ibm in house cores and rambus memory.
business lap tops needing graphics and internet bandwidth.
"dolphin", the code name for the new nintendo 64.
graphics, graphics, graphics. ibm has hooked up with motorola to maximize the power pc architecture. lots of justification here. tons of memory in these pc's used by practically all graphics designers.
hd dvd
other consumer products using rambus we don't know about yet.
in 12-18 months, low end pc's.
another little use i thought of...servers!!! even at the higher per dram cost, drdram is cheaper than sdram in servers due to the reduced pin count economies. geoff tate explained that well.
if true, this would justify the expense of building a drdram production plant.
of course this is all just conjecture on my part, but i'll bet a beer that most if not all of it turns out to be true.
unclewest
what do you think?
to the "register" editor and or "cahners" editor, feel free to publish this, intact, under your own name.
wonder if the reporters ever figured out that when the ee's say rambus 300, they mean 600. when they say rambus 350, they mean 700 and 400=800? |
