Hi Sun Tzu; Re your understanding of RDRAM...
Since you're not in the industry, you have to understand that a lot of your understanding has been provided by information from parties that are either incompetent or not disinterested. But it's good that you made a list. Here's my take on the points:
(1) Yep. AFAIK Rambus has protection for RDRAM.
(2) DDR scales considerably better than RDRAM. The issue is complex, and can not be approached with out specifying what kind of scaling. Memory systems have four characteristics, MBytes, peak bandwidth, latency, and block transfer size. But over the region that would include servers, DDR is preferable.
(3) Wrong. DDR chips are available that have better bandwidth than any available RDRAM chip. DDR DIMMs are available that have higher bandwidth than any available RDRAM RIMM.
(4) Right. Generally, DDR has less latency.
(5) Right. DDR is cheaper.
(6) 50/50. The memory makers do hate Rambus, but that doesn't mean that they will turn down a profit. What the memory makers want to do with RDRAM is force it into a niche product. In order to do this, the best weapon that they've come up with is to break the RDRAM market (not the RIMM market, mind you), into too many segments so as to avoid a commodity situation. To do this, several of the memory makers came up with different pinouts for RDRAM chips, and these are incompatible. (There are 5 such pinouts available now, though I've posted a list of only 4 of them.) Consequently, after you write a contract to buy RDRAM chips from Micron, for instance, there is no second source available. This allows Micron to charge higher prices. See #reply-15751210 for a list of the various pinouts that RDRAM has been splintered into. Samsung has a manufacturing with RDRAM over the other guys, while Micron has an advantage with SDRAM and DDR. One has to take what those two companies say with a bit of a grain of salt.
(7) I think so.
(8-9) Outside my area of expertise.
(10) I think that Rambus already has lost the 2/3 of their revenue accounted for by SDRAM and DDR. Wall street agrees that those royalties were 3/4 the long term value of the company.
There are also design issues. See #reply-15751210 (same as above) for a description of why the industry, (now that Intel has given up on forcing RDRAM down the memory makers throats), isn't designing very many new RDRAM based designs.
-- Carl |
