Pomp,
Funny you should mention your corporate PC purchasing situation ("Each year we have a "standard" machine we buy which is intended to have at least a four year useful life in the workplace"). I'm working with a laptop manufacturer right now and that's exactly the same scenario they use in describing their customer's buying behavior, although they don't usually get 4 years out of a product.
As I just mentioned in my reply to Voop, I think there are some issues that we can argue about with the anti-Rambus crowd until we're blue in the face and it won't change anything until the product is out and shipping for a while. Price is certainly one of those. In the last couple of weeks we've seen a couple of claims that RDRAM will cost 6X or 10X the cost of SDRAM. Kash thinks it's going to be a $300 difference for 256M. We just have to agree to disagree for now and see how it goes. Samsung, LG Semicon, and now Micron have all said that RDRAM is the most important new product for them. I believe that they'll enjoy some initial "unusual profits", but once they all start cranking, competition will drive the price down. But we'll just have to wait and see. I've waited two years, I can wait two more months <G>.
I'm still very interested in how Kash thinks the engineers at Intel, Sony, Nintendo, Compaq, Dell, HP, Panasonic, and Texas Instruments (to name a few of the design wins) were bamboozled. You'd think with all those successful companies that they'd have smarter engineers than that <G>.
Dave |
