Hi pompsander; Re: "Is RDRAM...and all its variations...actually dead?"
Here's what Rambus management was saying to its shareholders about future RDRAM market penetration back in February 2000. It's really rather stunning that they could be so wrong in less than four years:
Annual Meeting Notes
February 9, 2000, Rambusite.com
By Dave B Of Silicon Investor
...
Harmon presented first (through the end of Phase I below, then Tate took over)
Market Share Forecast
Dataquest and Instat both forecast the following market shares for RDRAM (of the DRAM market)
1999 tiny
2000 10%
2001 30%
2002 50%
2003 60%
...
DDR - is evolutionary from SDRAM (though later he said it was not evolutionary because you couldn't use SDRAMs in a DDR motherboard). In the interim this will be used in servers, which he called a niche market. As for DDR in PCs, RDRAM has a faster per pin rate and is scaleable since you can add RDRAM channels more easily (no change to the story). In Value PCs, he called it a myth that you needed RDRAM only for performance and used the PS2 as the example. You can get the full bandwidth of the technology from a single chip, which will be less expensive than 8 or 16 chips. He also showed a line drawing of a TI DDR DIMM which had 11 additional support chips on the DIMM for buffering, latching, et cetera. Lots of chips! With RDRAM in production now, with over 50 controller design wins, and with DDR at least a year behind RDRAM, Harmon called it ludicrous that anyone would forecast that DDR would outship RDRAM in 2000 (take THAT, Sherry!).
Advanced DRAM Technology Consortium - he said that this is an admission that the SDRAM/DDR technology is at the end of its life. The consortium is targeting 2003 as the date to release their new technology. That gives RDRAM four years to penetrate the market before they even show up. And once they do show up, they are going to have to be a leap ahead of RDRAM to convince everyone to put in place a new infrastructure to support the technology. Also, if they try to implement any technology that's packet-based, they'll probably run into Rambus patents. Finally, Harmon pointed out that consortiums have not worked in the past very well. Tate, in the Q&A session, supported that statement be saying that the biggest problem with consortiums is goal congruence. Rambus has been talking to the members of the ADT and they found that the manufacturers have different objectives for the consortium. This will make it hard to accomplish anything. He pointed out that one of the members even said that they expect it to take a year just to get the group infrastructure defined and in place.
...
rambusite.com
The past four years have proved that Rambus management, despite having some successes with Intel, were at least horribly mistaken, but more likely lying through their teeth about RDRAM's expected market penetration. By February 2000 everyone in the industry knew that RDRAM was dead, dead, dead and that DDR was the next mainstream memory. If anyone, in a position of authority, had been dreaming that RDRAM was going to be 60% of the market in 2003, they wouldn't have started all those DDR chipsets in 2000.
So now Rambus' hopes are pinned on lawsuits, a subject, like market penetration, where they have had some successes and some failures.
Do you guys really want to trust your money on a stock run by people's whose judgement is so bad that they thought that 60% of the memory market would be DDR in 2003?
The only information Rambus management will ever give you is "facts" that support their contention that you should buy their stock. From them. Now. And their management has been selling stock to you losers for years, but the big payoff keeps slipping off into the indefinite future.
-- Carl |
