inventories currently in place, the continued improvement of yield, the emergence of DDR, and the reduced demand for PCs and cell phones.
Early we agree on about everything but RDRAM. DDR is going nowhere IMO. I will bet you before the year is out AMD will be supporting RDRAM.
DDR is running into the same types of "noise" problems that RDRAM did, DDR is now 1 full year behind RDRAM in deployment, DDR costs more than RDRAM (surprize to the DDR biggots who said RDRAM was too expensive and hard to produce - LOL), I fully expect Rambus to win its lawsuits(1 more signing yesterday so now 50% have licenses on SDRAM DDRAM and RDRAM with RAMBUS. DDRAM carries a far higher % of roylaties than RDRAM. Also, Samsung just announce new dies for RDRAM increasing the yields and profits. Finally RDRAM is a STANDARD. DDR is design by committee. MU's DDR is only certified if MU installs it. Its no wonder DDR is delayed. Keep watching those delays will you. THe DDR biggots (I do not mean you), were saying Feb 2000 launch, then Jun 2000, then the "BIG DDR ROLLOUT" in Sept, then delays till Nov, Now delays for the most part until Q1 of 2001. There will be more delays and more DDR problems I guarantee it. In the meantime INTC is by design married to RDRAM. They are trying to produce chipsets that will support either RDRAM or DDRAM but so far these chipsets have required a memory translator hub that in a single word sucks. By the time they succeed (and I maintain they are not really trying!, they are just toying with AMD and MU so that AMD falls further behind, and MU gets fully punished), it will be too late as RDRAM prices will be competitively priced.
There are now only two holdouts of significance MU and Infineeon. MU is in deep deep do do IMHO, to put it mildly. They will be forced to pay higher royalties and did nothing to upgrade their plans for the next standard in memory. One huge MF problem as I see it.
MU is an out and out thief as is most of the rest of the industry IMHO. I put an ENORMOUS amount of time tracking these issues this year. I fully expect RMBS to be one of the few signing stars of tech this year, in spite of the slowing demand for PCs. Their value chain is just too too huge.
Cheers
M |
