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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles R who wrote (66521)	7/23/1999 4:20:00 PM
From: grok	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1574304

Re: Platform99 This could be described as a chance for the non-Intel/Rambus world to get together and talk about how they see the future evolving. There were four or five parallel sessions continuously for two days. It was well attended with meeting rooms usually overflowing although the meeting rooms were rather small. Micron and Via were especially well represented. Micron had at least four people presenting. The JEDEC DDR-II chairman presented and also a guy from AMII which seems to be a sort of extension of JEDEC. Many other vendors presented and/or exhibited. The general theme was that PC100/PC133/DDR/DDR-II represents a smooth evolution of dram technology which can provide everything that the industry needs in a predictable, non-risky, non-disruptable way. Micron explained the economics behind the dram business to explain why evolution makes sense. Via explained their chip set roadmap and their support for the dram evolution. Desi Rhoden of AMII explained how the DDR DIMM will be called PC2100 after its bandwidth of 2.1 GB/s (higher than RIMM of 1.6 GB/s). Joe Macri of ArtX is head of JEDEC Future Dram Task Force which is defining DDR-II and he explained how the DDR-II definition is being cleaned up and will allow between 3.2 and 4.8 GB/s. (Incidently ArtX is the graphics designer for next generation Nintendo game and the Rambus thread is counting this product as a Rambus design win which would make you wonder why Macri is head of DDR-II.) Also, there were many presentations by a number of people showing dram forecasts where drdram volume remains small for quite a while. No one presented anything that could be interpreted as optimistic for Rambus. The audience included a number of people from PC companies who were clearly involved in bringing out new PCs some of which are Rambus based. They were pretty guarded in what they would say. I got the feeling that some of the people designing in Rambus may reevaluate their plans based on doubts about drdram supply, price, and lack of benefits. Everything was organized by Bert McComas. He gave a wrap up at the end. I think that he unintentionally undid some of the anti-Rambus momentum that had built up during the two days by turning it into a rant against Intel/Rambus. His biase showed through very clearly and I'm sure that it rubbed many engineers in the audience the wrong way. I wish I had time to write more but gotta get on to other things.