A follow-up on the general semiconductor market -- in particular, the Intel-compatible market.
In 1997, Dataquest said this market had total revenues of $20,053M. Intel had 93.3% of this market ($18,700M) -- down as a percentage from 94.5% in 1996. In 1997, AMD had $789M, Cyrix $302M, IBM $159M, and Others $103M. This puts the total for others than Intel at $1,353M. With a 4% royalty stream, assuming a capture rate of 100% of the market, this puts Rambus revenues from this small segment at $54.12M. Of course, the market will hopefully grow in 1998-2001, but this might give a feeling for the potential.
Only question for Rambus in this market is how the Socket 7 limitations might negatively influence companies trying to increase the processor/memory bandwidth. I've read a little about Super7, AMD's socket 7 replacement, but am unclear what it will do past 100MHz.
The questions in my previous post concerning Rambus potential in the general embedded market seem to me to be the most pertinent with respect to how quickly the company will be able to grow their revenue. Any insight in this would be greatly appreciated. |
