Good morning Glenda and UpNorth, Uncle Frank and Merlin:
Intel's decision to support PC 133 SDRAM has been expected, and would think is already nearly fully built into the price of the stock, or at least, it should be. Intel's comments are interesting; on the one hand, not supporting PC 133 until next year would seem to be a way of slowing adoption of this continuous extension. OTOH, the fact that Intel is doing this at all says that even this gorilla cannot dictate everything, and means Rambus is not 100% protected. Nevertheless...
Rambus will be a successful investment, I believe, for a minimum of 2-3 years. It can become a gorilla, and that would extend its success for many more years.
In Gorillaspeak, by being adopted in niches like video (Nintendo & Sony...= dominance) and workstations (Dell, Compaq) by the end of this year, Rambus will have crossed the chasm and be in several bowling alleys (niche markets). It will enter other niches, as Intel produces coppermine for laptops (Y2K), the Carmel chipset for servers, and especially Timna which as I understand it will build a rambus compatible chipset on a low-end PC processor chip (the eventual low-end PC market for Rambus). The timna could be especially favorable to Rambus, as this might exclude other memory options entirely to all timna products.
The more niches it can occupy, the greater its likelihood that it will be "suddenly" widely adopted, and enter the tornado.
Rambus is volatile, and seems to be "in play", with Joe-average smalltime investor (me) being jerked around. But if one is really long, and buy & hold (me), then all of this volatility is meaningless (my friend DownSouth, are you listening?).
I believe the Rambus story, like Q, is intact. We need only 12 months or so for Rambus to become widely entrenched in video and PC/workstations, such that memory manufacturers are heavily invested in Rambus production, are making profits, and now are less interested in switching to yet another memory standard. This will be further solidified when more memory intensive applications hit the market and are further enabled by Rambus memory, with scalability. Should another memory standard come along to compete, I believe that we will all "see it coming" and have time to safely exit (with Rambus profits in hand), because of the significant participation by the SI threadsters and because a new memory standard takes so long to be built, tested, etc before being adopted.
Best to all,
Stan |
