Nov 26, 2000
P4 launch fails to lift Rambus demand
By Jack Robertson
Electronic Buyers' News
(11/22/00, 12:48:37 PM EST)
Intel Corp.'s launch last week of the Pentium 4 microprocessor may be the best
hope yet for Direct Rambus DRAM to ramp into the market.
Yet despite the fact that the new Intel CPU was designed to exclusively support
Direct RDRAM, three of four major suppliers contacted said they were receiving
few OEM orders.
One vendor, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., said it increased fourth-quarter
production of Rambus chips 20% sequentially to meet demand. However, in a
series of interviews, executives at Hyundai Electronics, Infineon Technologies,
and Micron Technology reported little activity among PC customers at a time
when OEM plans to ship Pentium 4-based desktop systems would appear to
require increased Rambus production.
Hyundai and Micron each said the companies have largely stopped Direct
RDRAM production and will not make more chips until customer orders
materialize. Infineon, which claims to have manufactured several million Direct
RDRAM chips a month this summer, said it was left with inventory and also has
stopped making the chips.
Each of the three DRAM makers is involved in lawsuits with RDRAM developer
Rambus Inc., Mountain View, Calif., over rights to SDRAM patents Rambus claims
to own. Despite the exchange of complaints, the suppliers said pending litigation
wouldn't stop them from resuming Direct RDRAM production.
“We will make whatever DRAMs our customers want. We just don't see any OEMs
in the market now for Direct Rambus,” said Infineon president and chief executive
Ulrich Schumacher, in an interview at the Electronica 2000 trade show last week
in Munich, Germany.
Farhad Tabrizi, vice president of strategic marketing and product planning at
Hyundai's DRAM business unit in San Jose, said the company has essentially
stopped making Direct RDRAMs until it gets new orders.
By contrast, Hans-Dieter Mackowiak, senior vice president of sales and marketing
at Samsung Semiconductor Inc., San Jose, estimated that Samsung has 80% of
the global market for Rambus memory, which accounts for about 8% of
Samsung's total DRAM bit production.
Speaking at Electronica, Mackowiak said Samsung is dedicated to making
Rambus a major factor in the memory market. To this end, the company two
weeks ago announced prototypes of next-generation 256- and 288-Mbit Direct
RDRAM made on a 0.17-micron process.
Both Samsung and Toshiba Corp. are producing Direct RDRAM for the Sony
PlayStation 2, which uses two chips per game console. NEC Corp. is believed to
be producing limited quantities of the chips, but executives at the company
could not confirm output levels by deadline.
Rambus did not return calls seeking comment. However, Rambus president David
Mooring two weeks ago predicted that Direct RDRAM would capture 40% of the
total DRAM market by 2003.
Last week's debut of the Willamette-class Pentium 4, which is equipped only to
support Direct RDRAM, was heralded as the memory technology's defining
moment in the PC market. Most major OEMs, including Compaq, Dell, Gateway,
Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, introduced workstations or high-end PCs using
Pentium 4 and Rambus memory. Most models were priced above $3,000, which
has been Intel's initial target market for Pentium 4.
Danny Lam, an analyst at Fisher-Holstein, Wilmington, Del., said the pricey
Pentium 4 systems will be a niche market, and existing OEM inventories are
enough to support the PC's limited initial production quantities.
Andreas von Zitzewitz, executive vice president at Infineon, said the company's
OEM customers “can live off the amount of Direct RDRAM chips we produced for
them this summer. Infineon had ramped up to several million Rambus chips a
month because Intel had promoted its Pentium 4 and Direct Rambus heavily with
OEMs. Then, this fall, OEMs suddenly stopped ordering, claiming they had
enough units on hand to meet their foreseeable requirements.”
Earlier this month, Micron chairman, president, and chief executive Steve
Appleton told EBN that major PC OEMs informed Micron they could get whatever
quantities they needed from available sources such as Samsung.
Bert McComas, an analyst at InQuest Research Inc., Gilbert, Ariz., said some
OEMs may be holding back on Rambus because Intel has publicly committed to
offering its Northwood-class Pentium 4, a mainstream PC version, with SDRAM
memory in mid-2001. |
