Sam,
<I shake my head every time I see an analyst predicting that Direct RDRAM (DRDRAM) will never penetrate the low end of the PC market. With all its money, Intel has the luxury of investing for the long-term. Anyone who restricts DRDRAM to a high-end niche needs to refocus his binoculars or polish his crystal ball. After years of development effort by thousands of engineers spending millions if not billions of dollars, I struggle to imagine a scenario in which DRDRAM will be unsuccessful. Non-PC platforms, such as Sony's upcoming Playstation 2, will only increase the probability of DRDRAM's acceptance.
Most of the companies criticizing Rambus are behind schedule in their own DRDRAM programs or are understating their yields, to deceive their competition or extract the maximum profit margin from their customers. Yield, which translates to cost, will fix itself in a process generation or two or with a few design tweaks. You heard the same grumbling during the EDO-to-SDRAM transition years ago. Similarly, many critics of integrated graphics have just not yet secured their own partnerships with core-logic and CPU vendors.
Be careful when you hear someone bad-mouthing a new technology. Dig a little to find out what vested interests they might have in ensuring that this approach doesn't succeed. Disparaging Intel, Microsoft, and Rambus is very fashionable these days, and many people in the editorial community are taking the easy way out by doing it.
- Brian Dipert, Technical Editor>
This guy knows our arguments against the AMD-ites so well that he must be one of our bull posters. 'Fess up, uncle. Is your real name Brian Dipert? <G>
Dave |
