Hi charred water; Re Samsung finally shipping a total of 10 million RDRAM chips.
Given that this is the largest maker of the things, that they took this long to win those warrants is an indication that the RDRAM ramp is going quite badly. I was beginning to suspect that the award had been made without a press release, it is so late. The year is six months gone, that Samsung has only now produced 10 million chips (including last years production) is amazing.
The timing of this news supports prior indications that Samsung was making only 2 million RDRAM chips per month, and will increase this to 3 million per month. Total world production of DRAM chips is something like 4 billion per year, or 300 million per month. At 3 million per month, Samsung's RDRAM share is around 1%. Adding other manufacturers into the figures means that RDRAM is going to come in at under 3%, in terms of units, for the year.
With a price of say 2x or 3x SDRAM prices, dollar share will be larger, but RDRAM will not achieve as much as 10% dollar volume for 2000.
Semico's projections (as used by Micron in their conference call) are on target, while Instat and Dataquest are going to have to reduce their numbers again.
(Of course, if Rambus can collect royalties on SDRAM and DDR, this is not particularly bad news for RMBS. But it is not good news for RDRAM, especially with the Intel SDRAM support coming out now.)
-- Carl |
