Dean Kent on Rambus
From YAHOO by: h0db (40/M/Tysons Corner, VA)
05/25/01 08:18 am EDT
Msg: 287960 of 288064
A little background. Dean Kent hates Rambus. He has been tormented for almost two
years by John Corse on usenet, who has mindlessly pumped rambus and turned his
battle with Dean into a personal vendetta.
I'm 99.99% certain that this "John Corse" characters is our own (erstwhile long)
"TechFuture2XXX", aka "Sylvestor80" on the SI board.
So when Dean says the following, it means something, IMHO:
realworldtech.com
"...Ironically, these [court] decisions may have had the exact opposite effect that people
expected. Instead of causing manufacturers to completely abandon DRDRAM, they
now appear to be more willing to embrace it. This may be due to the fact that Rambus is
now less 'scary' as a player in the industry, and is evidenced by Intel's recent decision to
once again push back their i845B chipset (P4 DDR) several months at least. Though this
may seem like a bad thing for those who are staunchly opposed to anything Rambus, it
could be exactly what the industry needed to move forward. The P4 was designed for
memory bandwidth, and currently only DRDRAM can deliver.
Much of the DDR vs. Rambus ‘war’ was politically motivated, rather than technically.
Both technologies had their benefits and drawbacks last year, but DDR was the one that
had the political advantage, for several reasons. As long as there was a threat of Rambus
controlling the industry, the politics were more important than the business or technical
issues. It has now become obvious that DDR is not a panacea for all memory woes, and
DRDRAM does have a huge benefit in bandwidth, which the Pentium 4 was designed to
exploit. With the most serious drawback for DRDRAM no longer that much of an issue
(price), it can be seriously considered a contender for the next memory standard.
Going out on a bit of a limb, and being sure to state this only as a personal opinion, I
believe it is possible that by the end of next year we could see DRDRAM with a fairly
significant market share (more than 20%), with all memory makers producing parts, all
chipset makers including support in at least one of their chipsets, and AMD making
products that utilize it. My reasoning here is that something must replace SDRAM, and
DDR seems to be losing momentum right now, Intel is still strongly behind DRDRAM,
SDRAM/DDR margins are non-existent, and since Rambus has been brought down to
earth the resistance from memory makers has a chance of crumbling. No doubt Micron,
Infineon and Hyundai will not be extremely happy if this occurs, but on the other hand,
Rambus would not be in much of a position to deny a license to manufacture, since it
could be their only source of revenue. |
