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To: Zeev Hed who wrote (47125)	7/14/1999 3:13:00 PM
From: benwood	Respond to of 53903

Zeev, I agree with your idea that Intel wants to remove the memory bottleneck. However, I disagree that it will be caused by Rambus, per se. They realize that even if Rambus does not dominate, their investment in Rambus will either result in Rambus bringing faster access to market, or a competitor will. Either way, they will win. I just don't happen to believe it will be Rambus, but it does appear quite certain that it will be something, and fairly soon. Also, I agree that the applications will come along. I don't agree that they are even near. If you study the Internet capabilities, there simply is not infrastructure now or in several years to support what you are talking about -- video, etc. The good video I watch at home is 100 kbs... and it isn't that great nor long. There are many many problems to raising the bar for everyone in that arena. Read your lips? Must've been a <g> why would anyone care about that when you already have speech recognition with a 200 MHz Pentium? Plus, I can use the telephone for 5 cents per minute, the TV for free... hard to justify a computer expense based on that usage, which most people have realized by now. My point is that computers have proven to be money pits for most people in terms of bang for the buck. Most people I know (i.e. 80%) don't have a single, solitary need to upgrade. Many of them have indicated that they don't think they will EVER upgrade (although their opinion will undoubtedly change in the next 10-20 years <g>). This indicates to me that the hardware already has heavily outstripped the software needs of MOST people, and I think this situation will continue due to the difficulty of producing more sophisticated, reliable software (thank C++ for that). This is the first time this situation has occurred since Windows first came out, and I think this reversal is causing demand to drop off dramatically for hardware and for the lagging, nothing original in a long time software. The cause of this reversal -- software lag and/or apathy towards software -- I think is a long term problem and resembles when the video boom busted back in the mid 80s.

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (47125)	7/15/1999 1:56:00 AM
From: Carl R.	Respond to of 53903

What memory/CPU bottleneck? I knew a guy once that had some kind or simulation program that was 32mb large and which contained no loops except the master 32k loop. His program would benefit from RDRAM, if the performance issues can be solved. For most applications there is an 80% hit rate or so for L1 cache, and a 90+% rate for L2. Thus if RDRAM sped a computer up by 4-5% on most work it would be a huge surprise to me. Since a 30% improvement is about the smallest size that anyone notices unless they are holding a stopwatch, I fail to see how RDRAM could make a noticeable difference for most applications. Carl