Prophet,
Have you ever gone to the BBSs of these hardware sites? Maybe you should do it once in a while to understand the mentality of the gamers / enthusiasts / performance freaks.
These people don't buy Dell / Gateway / Compaq, they build their own computers. The name of the game is to build the fastest machine without spending too much money. You will find every trick in the book to overclock the computers, for example buy 600 MHz CPU for $250, and overclock it to 800 MHz or more, and make the machin perform faster than one with $900 CPU, buy PC-133 RAM, run it at 140 MHz or more.
Anyway, their darling platform was BX, with Celeron (Mendocino) and Pentium CPUs. Intel was happily collaborating, producing CPUs that were overclockable to some degree, and everyone was happy.
Now enter Rambus. Intel witheld the resources from updating their beloved BX, decided not to support PC-133, and shove overpriced POS called Rambus down peoples throats, along with the flaky Camino 820. The reaction of Tom and the reaction to Anand's Rambus "editorial" is typical. Rambus has completely lost the performance freak crowd. And that's an understatement. They hate Rambus. Tom is just preaching to the choir, not setting any trend. Most people already know that going with Rambus means spending $400 to $500 per 128 MB of RAM and get no performance increase in return.
I guess Rambus realized this, and sent their PR guy to smooth things over with the hardware sites (perhaps dropping some of those warrants along the way), but it was a miscalculation. It backfired.
I think it is a problem for Rambus. They have a premium (price) product, and usually "enthusiast" crowd is the first to buy this, and later, as the price goes down, the product gets further down the food chain. Rambus lost the battle for the mindshare of people who would normally evangelize a product to their friends.
Joe |
