Hi visionthing; Do you really think it's necessary to threaten me with lawyers? Man, what a thread bully!!!
For those of you who were too lazy to click on the links, here is a repeat of the more juicy quotes:
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.
My other post isn't as fun, but I stand by the basic prediction:
Rambus is quite dead. It may have a few more twitches as it subsides into coma and decay, but its future is quite obvious. The shares have been largely shoved into the hands of mom and pop, and mom and pop may run the short interest, but in the end, the company is quite dead. The chance that the memory community (or any other engineering community) will ever again trust Rambus with the design of an interface is zero. The royalty and fee income will slowly decline, and Rambus will close its doors.
As far as the above prediction goes, we should note that Intel sure seems to be producing a lot of those little chips that make DIMMs look like RIMMs...
-- Carl |
