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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC)
INTC 34.50+2.6%Nov 21 9:30 AM EST
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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (83312)6/13/1999 7:57:00 PM
From: grok  Read Replies (1) of 186894
 
RE: <The story of Rambus is one big high-tech soap opera. But I still firmly believe that Rambus will end up the victor in the end. Tenchusatsu>

Sure, it is almost a foregone conclusion that Rambus will win in the end. The problem is in the near term and it is in uniprocessor desktop systems.

The other day someone pointed out the Microprocessor Report article (Oct 26, 1998, page 12) on the 21364. That article referenced another article written by Dick Sites called "It's the Memory, Stupid!" which covered work he had done analyzing a 400 MHz 21164 running TPC-C benchmark showed that the memory system was badly bandwidth limited and there was no point in providing a faster processor until a better memory was provided. So the 21364 has 4 drdram ports directly connected to the processor. This is great since it provides massive bandwidth and reduces latency since it removes chip set delay. The chip also has 1.5 MB of on-chip L2 cache. I'm sure that this product will blow away more conventional products in the Transaction Processing Server market.

The above paragraph is the good news about Rambus. Now the bad news is that most computers are not wide SMP Transaction Processing Servers. They're just simple desktops and don't need all that bandwidth. Except for Gamers people are running Word and Netscape and stuff like that and srams do the job pretty well. Now if drdrams could be slipped in at the same price at the same performance invisibly to the customer then no one would care. But what we're looking at now is higher prices, limited availability, and no performance gain and probably even a performance loss.

Now if you were a box maker and you had a choice of:
1. Coppermine at Intel's typical high price with Camino with Intel's typical high price with drdram at 2x or 3x sdram prices or
2. K7 priced below Coppermine with AMD chip set priced below Camino with dirt cheap sdrams available in massive supply from everyone.

And with 2. out performing 1. perhaps by a substantial margin, which would you choose to bring to market? And if you're a consumer which would you buy?

Intel should have brought drdrams into the market in servers and waited until they were ready for desktop before forcing this on everyone. In fact that is how they are treating IA-64.
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