Then short it.
Pay special attention to the bold, courtesy of Greg....also italic, courtesy of bp:
Rambus Falls 13% as Intel to Evaluate Alternative
Mountain View, California, July 19 (Bloomberg) -- Rambus
Inc., a designer of high-speed computer chips, fell 13 percent
after Intel Corp., one of its biggest promoters, said it plans to
evaluate a competing technology.
Rambus fell 14 3/8 to 98 5/8. It shares reached a record 117
1/2 last week on optimism that its technology will become a
computer standard. Rambus licenses its high-speed technology
to
memory and microprocessor makers, who pay royalties based on
the
amount of products sold.
No. 1 chipmaker Intel is promoting Rambus's technology,
though today it said for the first time that it's also evaluating
an alternative called PC-133 after a number of PC makers asked
it
to do so.
''We are not backing away from (Rambus) technology in
any
way and still see it as the future,'' said Michael Sullivan,
an
Intel spokesman.
Sullivan said that if PC-133 proves viable, Intel may use it
as another transitional technology to Rambus, though it wouldn't
be ready until sometime in the first half of next year. The
current standard, PC-100, is still the official transitional
technology, he said.
PC makers were concerned about the availability and the cost
of Rambus-based memory chips so ''we said we would
evaluate,'' he
said.
Intel is expected to release its Rambus-based Camino
chipset, which also supports PC-100, in September. Intel needs
the chipset to boost the speed of its Pentium microprocessor
chips, which run PCs. A chipset acts as the intermediary between
the microprocessor and the memory.
''PC-133 is not a meaningful threat to Rambus, which
Intel
sees as the future,'' said Mark Edelstone, a Morgan
Stanley Dean
Witter & Co. analyst who has had a ''strong buy'' rating
on
Rambus since early June and has 12-month price target
of 150.
Some PC makers, faced with plunging prices for their
machines, are balking at using Rambus-based memory chips. The
chips can cost three to five times as much as current chips,
some
analysts say, and may offer little reason for the average PC
user
to buy Rambus-based PCs.
Market research firm Dataquest Inc. estimates the percentage
of memory chips sold based on Mountain View, California-based
Rambus's technology will rise to 67 percent in 2002 from 3.1
percent this year. |
