It's not quite on your point, but we have to keep in mind that, as far as we know now, the glitch is at Intel's house, and that it means revenue deferral, not revenue elimination. If a competitive product was running neck-and-neck against RMBS and a delay like this came up, it would be very serious. But there's not a competitor. RMBS still has next generation memory to itself.
It appears that the Camino/motherboard glitch is not the only glitch coming out of Intel these days.
dailynews.yahoo.com
In brief:
----------------
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Intel Corp. (Nasdaq:INTC - news) said it has discovered a bug in two versions of its Pentium III Xeon processors for the server and workstation market, a bug that will delay the shipment of servers based on the chip.
Intel said it is still shipping the chips -- a Pentium III Xeon with a speed of 550 megahertz and a level two cache of 512 kilobytes, and the other with one megabyte of secondary cache. Both chips run in configuration of eight processors on an Intel motherboard, called the Sabre. Cache is a reserved section of memory to improve performance.
The Pentium III Xeon 550 megahertz with two megabytes of level two cache is not experiencing any problems, Intel said.
``We expect to have the root cause and solution within the next few weeks,' said Chuck Mulloy, an Intel spokesman. ``We are still shipping those, but telling customers not to sell those systems and we are not shipping them with the Sabre motherboards right now.'
------------
To put the Rambus/Camino delay in perspective along with the Pentium III Xeon/Cache and previous product announcements over the years, we need to be reminded that smooth adoption (as if adoption is ever smooth!) of a next step technology is more difficult than we sometimes give credence. It's part of the process and amazing how the noise and FUD level has increased over the years when it comes to delays and glitches. Even at Apple, which is more of an in house operation because the OS/hardware union softens the coordination somewhat, experiences many glitches and delays. The PC industry with all the OEMs, Intel, Microsoft and logistics of coordinating the entire circus amazes me that progress can ever be made on an announced schedule without major glitches.
I wouldn't be so quick to throw the towel in yet on Rambus, Intel and the OEMs coordination. I think they are simply experiencing the normal process that must be gone through to arrive at the next step wave of product. Having so many good cooks in the kitchen at the same time is bound to create an accepted level of chaos, but the chances of experiencing the collective effort meal which has never before appeared on the menu - once the damn thing is finished - is mouth watering to say the least.
We have learned through our GG process that a degree of safety comes from paying for the meal once it has been eaten - or is at least is in the take out container for those who are always on the run. Some of us, myself included, pre-paid for our Camino/Rambus meal with the assumption that it would taste so good we overlooked the fact that until the smoke stops billowing out of the kitchen - let the cooks get it together no matter how long it takes before salivating.
The appropriate time to drool will come.
BB |
