Re: long, time consuming post...
Hi Glenn,
I've posted before that I have a small put position in Rambus, now I'll do it again for your sake.
You seem furious that anyone would question the notion that rambus will dominate the market for DRAM soon. If that is your unquestionable conclusion (in the absence of stone tablets written by the hand of God - your words), why are you on this message board?
A functional market, like a stock market, is theoretically always presenting the perfect price, based upon the best available information. Since that information is constantly changing, so is the price. The point of a group such as this is to try to stay current with that information and to ferret out possible wrong interpretations.
The rambus long case (if I may try to sum it up - correct me if I am in error) in a nutshell, is; Rambus is faster than SDRAM and not much more expensive, and even if it isn't, Intel will force the market to use it anyway.
The alternative is that Rambus is no faster or even slower than PC133/DDR, much more expensive, and that not even Intel can force an unsuitable solution onto the industry.
6 months ago, PC133 and DDR weren't in any one's near term roadmap, and VC was almost unheard of. Intel hadn't a problem with a platform launch in recent memory, and Intel had no real competition in either CPUs or chipsets - putting them in a good position to dictate to the markets.
Now PC133 has shipped before Rambus , and working, pre-production DDR chipsets from several vendors are being shown at Comdex by several vendors. Those tests that are available don't show an overwhelming benefit from any of the memory technologies.
Early pricing is now out with Rambus costing about 4 times as much as PCXXX. You can buy an entire PC with 128 meg of SDRAM for the price of 128 meg of Rambus (though I expect the price to come down in the next 6 months to where Rambus is only 2 times the cost of other types of memory, it could take more or less time)
AMD had a near flawless launch of the Athlon, camino / coppermine was late and buggy, and the OEMs that dumped AMD for Intel have been hurt, at least temporarily, in their market positions. Intel needed to apologize with actions and has since announced support for both PC133 and DDR technologies and said it would leave the choice of memory up to the OEMs. The near term (next year or the year after) dominance of the memory market by Rambus looks very unlikely, Rambus will either be a niche solution or gone completely in that time frame - yet the stock is trading higher than it was 6 months ago when there was simply a delay in the introduction and the rest of the story looked OK.
I would be interested in seeing any calm, reasoned contradictory arguments. I could easily be missing something in which case I should change my position, but demands for "tablets written by the hand of God" just reinforce my conclusion that a bunch of fools are keeping the price as high as it is right now, and that it will soon come crashing down.
Dan |
