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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian Anderson who wrote (25928)	7/29/1999 10:19:00 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Ian, System latency is actually a lot more complicated issue than the Samsung analysis presents. They are generalizing from only the single case of a page hit, but there are many other timing scenarios involving page misses, turnarounds, multiple pages open, etc. The point I have made about DRDRAM is that it does not improve latency, yet comes at a significant price premium. This makes it a bad choice for a desktop motherboard. Scumbria

To: Ian Anderson who wrote (25928)	7/30/1999 3:45:00 PM
From: grok	Respond to of 93625

RE: <Scumbria, You have mentioned latency as a problem with DRDRAM a number of times. Can you tell us what is wrong with Samsung's analysis at usa.samsungsemi.com which shows Rambus as having lower latency than either PC100 or PC133? Thanks Ian> The Samsung analysis uses PC133 sdram with CAS Latency 3(CL3) and PC100 with CL2. Hence, PC100 is faster than PC133. Most PC133 chips being built today are CL3. However they will soon be moving to CL2. Full speed drdram chips need 0.18u technology to meet speed. As the dram industry moves to 0.18u the PC133 sdrams will be fast enough for CL2 and then be faster than PC100 or drdram on the same technology. I think that a more fair comparison would be to compare them on the same technology. The transistion to 0.18u influences the ongoing war between drdram and sdrams. On technology earlier than 0.18u drdram was not meeting full speed very well so there was talk of 300 MHz and other sub-speeds. I believe that these sub-speeds have generally been dropped and everyone is intended to move to rambus in the 128Mbit, 0.18u version. This is one reason for the current high prices for drdrams since new technologies are always more expensive in the beginning. sdrams have a smoother path since 0.25u or 0.2 can yield PC100 or PC133 with CL3 so the price stays low. Dram makers may choose to use their limited 0.18u capacity for drdram and keep sdram on earlier technology. rmbs may get a boost soon when people start benchmarking systems with the same processor but drdram vs sdram because they'll probably use PC133 with CL3 and the drdram system will be faster. This won't be a very fair benchmark since they should use CL2 but I expect that will never get reported.