Hi Victor Lazlo; Thanks for the wish for savory satisfaction, I have already taken a good bit of it, and I expect to get a good bit more of it by this next summer. (Assuming I survive the millennial "celebration".)
It is only a little likely that Rambus can survive without the PC (or at least the graphics) market.
First of all, from the point of view of an investor, having Rambus shut out of the PC industry is almost as bad as having the company go completely tits up, given the very high multiples that the stock currently carries. The basic reason that the PC industry cannot be ignored is that the RMBS price tag already includes the assumption that the PC industry goes to RDRAM.
If Rambus is relegated to a niche market, then a lot of people who are buying the stock at the current price are going to have an unpleasant experience.
But I don't see Rambus keeping that niche market. The telling fact is the loss of the graphics market. Rambus provides a very high ratio of bandwidth to pincount, and that is something that is of great interest to the graphics industry in particular. But new design wins in that market are going to specialized application specific DRAMs such as 32-bit wide DDR SDRAMs. Rambus is frozen out of that industry.
The guys who do the game consoles are going to be the next to cut RDRAM out of the loop. When a memory technology starts to look like it is a loser, companies ask their engineers to redesign the product without it. (By "loser", I mean that the technology is too expensive, unreliable, big, power hungry, or is unavailable, which is what engineers care about.) This is very likely to be happening right now at Sony.
The first version of RDRAM had a better marketing environment. The ratio of its bandwidth to the bandwidths of competing chips was much higher. The current version has a much lower performance advantage, this is due to the rest of industry catching up, as is inevitable in technology. So Rambus is working on the next generation of memory chips. This is great, but the industry is ignoring them. Without Intel's forcing RDRAM on the memory and box making industries, the whole Camino fiasco would never have happened. Intel would have cancelled the project in a timely manner, and they would be selling DDR machines right now.
So the current situation is that Intel is no longer pushing Rambus on people, and Rambus, as a company, has a reputation for creating the biggest technology snafu of 1999. The thought that anybody is going to have anything to do with Rambus in 2003 or 2004 is ludicrous.
Mom and pop think that Rambus has a portfolio of patents that are capable of preventing other companies from designing high speed data interfaces. This, of course, is nonsense, as it is for nearly every technology company, but mom and pop are not in a position to evaluate this claim. Some of the guys on this thread were even suggesting that Rambus had a patent on the concept of sending data over a bus at a rate of one packet for each clock edge, rather than just the positive edges. The basic concepts that Rambus uses date to the 50s, and were either public domained or patented at that time. The things that they can patent are the details of how address and data are organized, but those are details that anyone can redo and get something that works just about as well. At worst, a guy might have to add a pin to avoid those kinds of patents.
It's just not possible to screw up an engineering project that badly and not ruin the reputation of the company. The Rambus story is over.
I should mention that Rambus screwed up the engineering in two obvious places. The first was that they wrote the spec in such a way that RDRAM chips had to be 25% larger than regular SDRAM memory chips. There is some talk about redesigning RDRAM to reduce that area penalty, but it is a little late. Rambus has been working on this stuff for 10 years, couldn't they get it right already? You would think that die area costs would have been something they would have thought through. The only explanation for them having missed this is that they really don't have any competence in memory chip design. It's as if total novices tried to tell the industry what to do, and then got Intel to back it with near monopoly muscle. This was a stunning screw up, truly an amazing error.
But that wasn't the crowning screw-up. The big one was leaving so little room for margin (voltage and timing) in their interface that the companies that had to build products to that interface standard were unable to do so. It was this error that cost Intel big time. I doubt that Intel execs are returning much in the way of telephone calls from Rambus right now...
The world tends to blame the workers when a company produces a product that is defective. And the world has largely left the reputation of Rambus intact, and has, instead, blamed the chip makers, memory makers, and board makers for the problems with systems using Rambus memory. But those of us who work as design engineers for a living know that the real cause of most manufacturing screw ups is lousy engineering. This is the cause of the destruction of the reputation of RMBS among design engineers. Bad design.
Rambus should take as a marketing slogan something like: "Hire Rambus to Design Your Memory Interfaces!", with a subtitle something like "even losers need to have a chance." At least the company that hires them won't be able to blame their own engineers.
Some of the longs think that memory technology is all about marketing. To some extent this is true, but you have to remember who the marketing is being performed upon. Mom and pop don't know $h:t about engineering, they are particularly susceptible to marketing hype. But Rambus sells to engineers, not to mom and pop. And the design engineers are rejecting RDRAM as a contender. Marketing isn't much of a consideration.
-- Carl |
