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

To: J_W who wrote (26642)	8/8/1999 9:08:00 AM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Jim Re: Please read this report in it's entirety Good Morning ! Well, I've read the Dell paper again and still come to the same conclusion. But I agree with you that it is a good paper. Dell plans to ship performance computers using rambus in the fall (as do all the other OEM's) because coppermine works with the 820 chipsets, and the 820 chipset works with rambus. Dell can either implement rambus, or start to de-implement Intel CPUs. This "intel effect" is a powerful one and I try to always include its potentially overwhelming impact in any rambus post. Dell knows it's going to be offering up some expensive rambus PCs sooner or later, and it hopes to sell them, and the white paper reflects a little of that. If you look at the paper carefully, you'll see the implication that a substantially faster memory bandwidth, especially one that can stream data at those faster rates instead of bursting it, yields a performance increase. Between the lines, it seems to say that this will more than make up for a slightly higher latency. Rambus 300/600 has the streaming data advantage and a bandwidth that is 50% higher than PC100 - yet 300/600 has been rejected as too slow to compete with PC100 (it's as fast as, but more expensive than PC100). If the problem isn't latency, what is the problem? If you look at the data sheets at micron, hitachi, LG, samsung, etc. you'll see that the latency doesn't come down much as you move from 300/600 to 400/800. And again, if latency wasn't the problem with 300/600, then what was? Dell's paper says it will ship its first rambus in performance PCs due to rambus cost - but Dell's paper seems to be making the same point that I was in its discussion of the future - that rambus's best bet is to drop in price and be used to save money through its low pin count and mboard trace count. If all of intel's future chipsets support nothing but rambus, and intel keeps changing its slot/socket designs to work with only it own chipsets, rambus's future is bright and certain, otherwise, it may not be. And while the near term may be tougher for Intel than anyone had been expecting, Intel continues to be in a position to do anything it wants. But I still maintain that rambus as a PC memory technology lives or dies depending on whether or not Intel is willing to absorb a big cost hit in what is looking to become a much more competitive market than it was a few months ago. Regards, Dan