All,
I have to say, I don't understand why everyone is worried about the extra royalty costs of RDRAM and the "dictatorial" approach that Intel is taking on RDRAM.
First of all, the DRAM manufacturers will just pass along the extra costs to the buyers. No big deal there. Their margins are going to get squeezed regardless of whether or not they have to pay Rambus. If they're smart, they did whatever was necessary to reduce the on-going royalty rate. But it's just another cost of doing business. Is the industry up-in-arms over the price of silicon? (or gallium arsenide, or whatever they make DRAM chips out of). Maybe, but it sure isn't getting any play in EE Times. Except for how well you've negotiated your royalties, the royalty doesn't tip the playing field in any particular direction. And the DRAM guys probably waste that much by not negotiating the best prices on all their other raw materials.
Second, Intel dictates all the time what the next standards will be -- the PCI bus, the disk drive bus, PC-100 SDRAM, AGP ports, the various slot technologies they've defined, and so on ad nauseum. And in many cases those technologies weren't developed by Intel, just defined as the "standard". I don't get all the noise. It's just another in a long string of technologies that Intel has decreed will be the next step. Nothing new here.
Just My Humble Confusion,
Dave |
