Hi Jdassoc; Thanks for verifying my estimate of the difference in price between the Outrigger 840 and Vancouver 820 boards.
Sure, Intel could sell the 840 boards at the same price of the 820s. It's called subsidy. But selling something at a discount doesn't have much to do with the cost of manufacturing it.
Rambus is supposed to be saving money. It is supposed to be providing the same bandwidth at a lower cost, and here you are talking about Intel taking a bath on a brand new product.
I, for one, never could understand why those "hipriced" ethernet cards were so expensive. From looking at the parts on them, it just didn't seem that they should have sold for more than $35 each. My suspicion is that the high priced cards were profitable in the extreme.
Why don't you go look up the details on the Intel investment in Micron, and post it for us all to look at. I am sure it will make fascinating reading.
You gave a list of various trends at work in the industry today. But you didn't include all the pertinent trends. For instance, you left off the trend in increased pin counts per package (and in decreased cost per pin). The increases in pin counts is what allows DDR to be fast enough for next year's processors.
In addition, there are other factors. For instance, increasing the size and efficiency of the cache of a CPU causes a decrease in the required bandwidth to achieve a given performance level. In engineering, there are no simple solutions.
I agree that PC100/133 are a little dated, and getting a little long in the tooth, but only because Intel screwed up the whole memory industry with the Rambus fiasco. If Intel had announced chip support for DDR a couple years ago, you would be buying PCs based on them today. Instead, Intel suppressed the alternatives to Rambus, and then screwed up delivery of the replacement.
Funny. I haven't been reading any articles in the EE-Times about the various memory makers halting production of DDR chips... In fact, they are announcing sampling or production all over the place. Do a search on DDR.
By the way, did you see the announcement today that Samsung is back in production on RDRAM? Samsung figures that the world is going to need a lot of those chips starting Monday. It really kind of amazes me that the bulls aren't talking about this more. Maybe that is why RMBS went up so much Friday.
-- Carl |
