MB/Earlie, re: Toshiba/Rambus
Mike, Toshiba has agreed to pay royalties on the current and future main memory product used in PC's. (SDRAM and DDRDRAM). Rambus claims the industry infringes on all memory currently shipping in PC's. A ~$30 Billion business this year.
They appear to want 1 - 2% of the revenue generated by this product.
Like you, Earlie, I was surprised to see someone break ranks, but I wasn't surprised it was Toshiba. The only real success story Rambus has to date is the Sony PlayStation 2 game console using RDRAM made by Toshiba.
Converting SDRAM to RDRAM in PC's has been somewhat of a disaster to date. (The first signal was at Intel's fall IDF, when a Dell Fellow presented a paper showing little or no improvement of the i820 with RDRAM over existing platforms. The paper has disappeared, but detailed benchmarks that were presented are still available on the net).
And of course DELL is now the leading PC maker proponent of RDRAM.
While a study of the patents may prove interesting, I don't think that's where you'll find the real answers. There are multi billions of dollars at stake here, including Intel's new platforms designed around Rambus. The industry is in serious conflict, with two powerful factions vying for the next generation of memory. If the industry agrees to pay the royalties Rambus is asking, much of the conflict goes away. (Certainly for Rambus). I'm sure that DELL would prefer to offer systems using the memory best suited to the market segments. In many cases this would be DDRDRAM. But do they dare to use mobo's based on Via chip sets with DDRDRAM memory? IMO Intel also needs to find a way to resolve the conflicts so they can develop products around the best memory solution for a particular market segment. (Smoke filled back room's?)
The question for me is, will the memory industry break ranks, or will this increase their resolve to fight back as an alliance. That's the next big story.
JMHO's |
