Dave B.,
Re:" 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>."
I think its a great question.
RDRAM clearly has advantages in high speed video apps so that certainly explains the Sony,Nintendo designs wins. And I hear that new generation video cards may use the technology as well.
But the big users of DRAMs are PC's and increasingly servers and workstations for main memory apps.
Now, it does appear that a whole bunch of engineers have been sold on RDRAM for desktops and workstations a few years ago. Now the big question is wether the reality meets the sales pitch.
Now folks like IBM have stated that RDRAM doesn't buy anything over PC 133 memory. Tom Pabst has tested camino with 800Mhz RDRAM and seen no appreciable performance gain.
When technical Rambus longs like Scumbria/Tench are asked WHAT WILL BE THE PERFORMANCE GAIN OF RAMBUS OVER PC133 in Q4 99 they start backpedalling.
I agree that IF rdram offers a 5-10% user performance advantage over PC133 then it will do OK.
If it offers no performance advantage customers will NOT pay for it they will use the extra $200-400 saved to buy faster CPU's, better Graphics cards, more memory, FASTER hard drives etc all of which offer better customer performance.
So the BIG question is WHAT IS THE PERFORMANCE ADVANTAGE OF RDRAM ove PC100/133 in system benchmarks.
Clearly if there is no advantage for current user applications then the company will crash and burn.
Regards,
Kash Johal. |
