Hi all; Re Rambus' technical expertise in memory design, for those who have forgotten:
Sep 6, 1999
Moves to pare Rambus costs while prepping chip set for SDRAMs -- Feeling the heat, Intel warms to PC133 support
...
Geoff Tate, Rambus chief executive officer, said Rambus and RDRAM vendors realize that having so many on-chip memory banks made it more difficult to efficiently lay out the redundancy bits needed for respectable yields. Adding redundancy bits for each bank increased die size, hiking costs. Cutting redundancy bits can also raise costs by reducing yields.
"If we knew then what we know now about the die size impact, we would have decided on fewer banks. But the issue is not just reducing the number of banks, it is making sure there is compatibility among the various DRAM vendors," he said.
...
techweb.com
Enough said, and straight from the CEO's mouth. If they had known. But they didn't, not on that issue, nor on a dozen others, and they completely screwed up Intel as a result.
-- Carl |
