Regarding inferiority of Rambus chips:
You guys haven't kept up have you (just responding to the two recent RDRAM comments). (1) price premium expected to hit 15% or less by 2002, 20% or less by then end of this year, (2) New Pentium 4 is scheduled to hit 2 Ghz...that is not a typo. Tell me, anyone, what memory interface out there exists that can keep up and not bog down a processor at these speeds?; (3) Rambus advantage is only apparent as processor speeds get greater, like in the faster running P3, during high bandwidth activities like streaming media, and during multi-tasking, like I'm doing now running a real time streaming portfolio, Excel, and 4 IE web-sites open simultaneously.; (4) in gorilla game terms AMD and DDR (note: DDR is still not in commercial production or release, not even at trade shows) is the status quo. Vendors fighting RDRAM are the lesser financed, lesser skilled vendors with an interest in heading off innovation because it puts them at a disadvantage. Getting chips to work with RDRAM is not easy, producing RDRAM is not easy. The firms who invest now and do so will be at a significant competitive advantage a year from now. This is what Intel and Samsung and NEC are doing. It is a classical gorilla power play of the gorilla innovators vs. the status quo also rans. The very venom being spewed at Rambus is evidence enough of this.
The fact is, and the legitimate non-Tom's HArdware testing world is beginning to conclude, that indeed Rambus works, and it even works better than we thought. The problem was you can't use existing benchmarks to test it because existing benchmarks aren't challenging enough and neither was last year's processor speeds.
This may explain why set-top boxes have begun shipping with RDRAM, over 70% of new work stations have shipped with RDRAM.
This aside, the key with Rambus is no longer RDRAM, they actually make more money off of DDR (should any ever hit the market). What Rambus looks like it will do is own the entire memory market. They are currently in litigation; the issue is whether or not Rambus' short-lived membership in JEDEC was sufficient to invalidate certain patents because they became public at that time. The legal case against Rambus is not that powerful, but I'll never underestimate a court's ability to decide something from left field.
But to dismiss Rambus out of hand with some hearsay FUD that may have been spread from somewhere is no different than dismissing Qualcom in 1997 because of the industry FUD stating CDMA was impossible. It does a disservice to this thread.
Rambus is on the verge of reaping from 1.5% to 5% of every memory chip made in the world (okay except for the truly exotic things like a FRAM for instance) and bringing in net margins in excess of 60-70%. That is a business case worth analyzing and understanding and not one that should be dismissed on a cursory glance.
Tinker
full disclosure: I own a lot of Rambus. But its not all I own. Besides, a gorilla of this potenial power is rare, we haven't found one since QCOM. What are we going to do, talk about QCOM all day?;) Honestly, I do think Rambus gets overlooked on this thread and I think it is a big oversight given the potential power of Rambus in the industry and all the collateral evidence pointing to Rambus winning an enormous industry struggle to the point that they may be gaining power even over Intel even as Intel was used as the platform to give Rambus a start. |
