RE: <Explain to me KZ why it is to Intel's strategic advantage to push a bum technology to the tune of billions of dollars with only marginal advantages?>
Yes, it is just quite an amazing story. I'm sure that books will be written about it in the future. I expect that the whole fiasco will be attributed to over confidence which lead to arrogance. The incredible market success has caused them to forget how they got to where they are. In ten years there will be books written about how Intel in the 90s set the stage for business reversal in the 00s and it will be compared to IBM in the 70s and 80s setting the stage for business reversals in the early 90s. The chapter on Rambus will be quite large.
RE: <Also, prove to me that the current delay is due to an intrinsic Rambus technology failure & not a chipset motherboard failure for example, or some other non-rambus related issue.>
Of course, no one knows the cause of the problem is or, at least, they're not letting on. Maybe it is a Camino problem. I wouldn't be surprised to see it get blamed on the Motherboard people or the RIMM people. They may be asked to go to more layers or increase their cost in some other way. Eventually that will just add more to the Rambus cost penalty but, I'm sure, it will come out of someone else's pocket, ie not Intel's.
RE: <Finally, why did you own Rambus a month ago & not now. I think you had high hopes for profit & are now pissed. If so, I understand & don't blame you for investing elsewhere, a very prudent move. Just doesn't convince me that Rambus & Intel don't know what their doing or what they have.>
I might as well give you my rmbs investing history. I first bought rmbs on May 28, 1997 with half my 401K that I had acquired by working 8.5 years at Intel and 5.5 years at Sun. I wanted to use all of it but my Dean Witter broker talked my down to half. Price was $30.75 and I sold on 7/9/97 at $50. Then I bought again on 8/2/99 at $86 and sold for the second time on 8/17/99 at $86. Finally I bought for the third time on 9/2/99 at 85.5 and sold on 9/7/99 at $90. That's my story.
When I bought the first time. I did it because I thought that Rambus was great and Intel had already annointed them but the world hadn't quite understood that yet so the price was quite low. When I bought the second time I was already having much doubt about Rambus technology but I thought Intel would ram it home so that it would succeed. I sold it the second time because I feared that they would mess up the ramp and I didn't want to be holding it if that happened. I bought the 3rd and final time during IDF when it looked like they were home free without any bad Intel announcement on PC133. I sold a few days later after I digested the news that Geoff Tate had admitted that Rambus has a significant die size penalty and he said something like: "if we had known three years ago what we know now we wouldn't have provided so many banks because the large number of banks cause problems with the redundancy hardware thus causing larger die size." That was the first time I had heard that problem and I had been expecting that the die size penalty was just due to things that would be reduced in higher densities thus causing the penalty to shrink over time. This problem sounds like it will will not shrink over time. It's bad enough that Rambus is even considering reducing the number of banks which seems to me would cause incompatibility with the older versions.
Now I'm out of rmbs and will stay out. As for convincing you that "Rambus & Intel don't know what their doing or what they have" I know that I cannot convince you. It does seem incredible. But then, who would have predicted that the US would lose the war in Viet Nam? |
