Hi wily; I would suppose that the 840 is going to be announced on time, but a lot of engineers are expecting Rambus to have reliability problems in the field. This is something that won't be known for some time now.
I really don't know what to say. There doesn't appear to be much in the way of industry rumors that the 840 is in trouble, but Intel managed to coverup the problems with the 820 until just 2 days before launch.
The problem for Intel / Rambus is that the box makers like to have bullet proof technology. This is (at least partly) obtained by beating the stuffing out of the prototypes. If prototypes fail, the failure mode is tracked down and evaluated as a possible manufacturing / reliabilty problem.
Engineering and Production typically have a certain amount of conflict over prototype testing before manufacturing begins. Production people tend to be kind of ignorant about the underlying principles of the things they are working on. On the other hand, engineers tend to be kind of dismissive of production.
What typically happens is that production beats the stuffing out of a prototype. (This can be done by running the unit in a very hot or cold environment, extracting and inserting the RIMM modules repeatedly, changing the power supply to be one known to be on the edge of its specs, (almost too high or low voltage), etc. Eventually, they get a board to err. When they report back to engineering what the have done, the engineers typically say something like "of course it failed, what did you expect when you tried to boot it at 70 degrees centigrade?" The two sides then argue as to whether the test conditions are "realistic."
But the production people have to test things at very unrealistic conditions, otherwise they are likely to give the okay on a design that is only marginal. I am sure that the annals of production engineers is replete with the stories of stuff that was just marginal at the prototype stage, and that then had high percentage failures at production. (Note that PC makers expect an extremely low failure rate from the production line, any deviations from this destroy profitabilty.)
A system that is marginal has to be treated with kid gloves during manufacturing. This means that no parts are allowed to be swapped without full verification that the new system will still work. For a system as complicated as Rambus, this is an impossible task. There are something like 100 distinct parts on a motherboard, the manufacturer is constantly swapping one source for another among some of them. The alternative is to buy enough capacitors, for instance, to supply yourself with (more or less) identical components for the entire production life. So production people have a big time preference for designs with lots of margin. This is something that Rambus just doesn't have.
The production people are looking for systematic failures in the early prototypes. That is the signal they are looking for, but there is simultaneously a lot of noise. The noise consists largely of the fact that prototypes frequently have manufacturing problems that are ironed out before production. Resistors are left out, or are of the wrong value. So there is always a certain amount of failure among the early prototypes, and companies are used to accepting this.
But after the production people smell blood, and they most certainly have on the Rambus issue, they go straight for the jugular, and will beat the living stuffing out of systems until they fail. Those guys are vicious. And if they can't get one system to fail, they will insist on testing fairly large numbers of them. Realistically, all this delays the time at which the box maker actually turns on production.
So while Intel may announce the 840 in a few days, I would expect the ramp to be fairly slow.
An early clue that things are going smoothly would be a rise in RDRAM pricing to the equivalent silicon cost of SDRAM, that is, maybe 50% higher or so. Until that happens, you will know for a fact that the box makers aren't taking chips off the memory makers hands.
Should be fun to watch. I am much relieved to not have any investment in Rambus...
-- Carl |
