Part 1 of 5
Okay, here it comes. I'm blasting out the notes that I took (9 pages). Some of these points are repetitive, or things that most of us know already, but some are not.
Anyone who was there is welcome to disagree or correct my statements. I was scribbling furiously and may have missed/misunderstood/misinterpreted anything.
I'm still amazed each year that the official business at these meetings is finished in ten minutes. We had an attempted disruption of the proceeding this year by several guys who tried to second Harmon's two motions (to close the meeting and something else) faster than the two women from Rambus who are planted in the audience each year to "so move" and "second" the motions. Fortunately, the two guys couldn't out-move the two women and everything proceeded as planned <G>.
Overall impressions
- as with lunch, the meetings are getting larger (Tish apparently missed the first two). The first year I think there were 3 of us that weren't from the company or auditors. Last year maybe a dozenish (or a little over). This year probably a little more than two dozen (it's getting hard to tell exactly who's from the auditors and Rambus and who's not).
- The presentation after the basic business followed the same format as previous years, though the content has changed.
- As I've mentioned already, I saw a little more fire from Tate, especially when discussing the lawsuit, than I've seen in the past. I was very surprised that they are not interested in licensing Hitachi, but would rather shut down Hitachi's SDRAM, DDR DRAM, and SH microprocessor products.
- Harmon presented first (through the end of Phase I below, then Tate took over)
Market Share Forecast
Dataquest and Instat both forecast the following market shares for RDRAM (of the DRAM market)
1999 tiny
2000 10%
2001 30%
2002 50%
2003 60%
RDRAM Systems in Production
There are currently 18 RDRAM-based systems available for purchase from Dell, HP, Acer, IBM, Compaq, Micron, and Gateway.
The PS2
Harmon covered again the fact that the PS 2 would have 2 128Mb RDRAM chips. He said that showing RDRAM working in a low-cost, low-end platform like this would have an effect on the consumer market. A little later in his presentation, he claimed that if the PS2 had used SDRAM or DDR, the number of pins on the CPU for memory access would have gone from the ~140 for 2 RDRAM channels to ~200 to ~400, requiring 16 SDRAM chips or 8 DDR chips. They estimate that this would have added $30 to $50 to the cost of making the PS2. |
