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

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (27171)	8/16/1999 2:31:00 PM
From: pompsander	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Tensch: As a complete technical illiterate I appreciate you taking the time to joust with Dan. It certainly helps me keep things in focus. As we roll towards the developer's conference it seems we have now created two separate but related arguments vis a vis Rambus. The technical argument - "it isn't any better than the other technology, so why bother" and the market argument--"even if it is better and is adopted to a large extent, the price/earnings/sales ratios are way out of line" Under this theory, success is still failure, as measured by the stock market over time. We'll see. The end of this month is going to be absolutely wild.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (27171)	8/16/1999 3:12:00 PM
From: dumbmoney	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Tenchusatsu, one thing all this benchmark jousting has proven is that none of the proposed DRAM evolutions (Rambus, VC, DDR, etc) will speed up vanilla applications (Winstone/Winbench) to any significant degree. Cost is key. A small performance increase is terrific if you can get it at little or no cost. It's not so terrific if it comes with a hefty premium.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (27171)	8/16/1999 3:48:00 PM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

tench, thanks for the posts and tech details written in a manner that i can understand. now feast your eyes on this from bloomberg news... unclewest Rambus Expects Bonanza From First PC Shipments: Bloomberg Forum New York, Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Rambus Inc., which develops super-fast memory-chip technology, expects a royalty bonanza later this year when personal computers that use chips it designed go on sale, said Chief Executive Geoff Tate. Rambus developed technology that increases the amount of data that can be transferred by a dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, chip as much as 10 times. All PCs require DRAMs to communicate with stored data. Rambus said royalty revenue for its third fiscal quarter ended June 30 rose 11 percent to $1.8 million from $1.6 million a year earlier. Royalties represented only about 17 percent of overall revenue of $10.6 million, most of which came from companies that signed contracts for its technology. ``If we achieve our goal over the next several years of achieving 50 percent of the DRAM market, our royalty income will increase some 50 times,' Tate told the Bloomberg Forum. By October, Tate said, customers including Compaq Computer Corp., the No. 1 PC maker, and Dell Computer Corp., the No. 1 direct seller of PCs, will ship their first models with Rambus- licensed DRAMs. Later this month, Tate said, Intel Corp., the world's No. 1 chipmaker, will announce that Rambus DRAMs meet specifications for next-generation chips for desktop PCs and say how they will be used in laptop PCs as early as 2000. As a result, Rambus expects revenue to increase rapidly, getting its next-generation designs into as much as 20 percent of all DRAMs shipped next year, Tate said. There could be a shortage as PC makers snap up the new chips, he said. Earnings The Mountain View, California-based company doesn't expect to get a financial boost until fiscal 2000 beginning Oct. 1, Tate said. The 6-cents-a-share average estimate of five analysts surveyed by First Call Corp. for fourth-quarter earnings is ``in a reasonable range,' he said. Analysts expect Rambus to earn 30 cents a share in fiscal 1999, more than doubling to 77 cents in fiscal 2000. Tate, 45, a computer scientist, said the world's top makers of DRAMs, including Micron Technology Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co., licensed Rambus designs. Rambus doesn't manufacture chips. Rambus DRAMs have been used in consumer-electronics products such as Sony Corp.'s PlayStation and Nintendo Corp.'s games since 1995, Tate said, providing the company's first royalty stream. Intel has warrants to buy a million Rambus shares for $10 each ``when more than 20 percent of their memory controller chips that connect on DRAMs connect on Rambus DRAMs,' Tate said. That could happen as early as next year, the CEO said, although Intel may take its time before exercising its warrants. Aug/16/1999 13:24

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (27171)	8/16/1999 7:47:00 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Tenchusatsu - probably not for the last time :-) Sorry if it wasn't clear - OK DDR 133 is only 166% faster than PC100, compared to Rambus 800's being 33% faster than Rambus 600 (or having 133% of the bandwidth) - 166 to 33 percentage increase - is that OK? (you're right, at least once I mixed the two measures) The benchmarks are the ones I've seen. I expect rambus to do very well on memtest also (actually, I expect it to do better than DDR 266) but these benchmarks seem to show that you don't need the cost and complexity of rambus to get big increases in raw memory throughput. The benchmarks also show that big increases in raw memory throughput make very little difference in most standard applications - which makes it hard to justify memory substantially more expensive than PC100. >all you're doing is repeating your own arguments I'm reposting thoroughly documented tests - where are the rambus tests? >PC133 has shown to have no benefit in real-world ... In CAS 2 100 vs CAS 3 133 it doesn't - but that's a rigged test. I doubt that latency 50 rambus 800 will do as well as latency 40 rambus 600 in real world tests either. Please post the tests for that comparison if you want to reference the samsung test. Hey, just post any test of rambus :-) >memory controller design hasn't matured yet Or something, but just wait until... To me, that's the issue with rambus - it was conceived when it looked as though 100MHZ was it for DRAM - it had been a rough transition from 66 to 100. But that was a long time ago, and the SDRAM variations have proven to have had more potential than was expected. A lot of time has gone by since the rambus specs were established. The world has changed in the meantime. The EV6 bus is designed to eventually run at up to 400MHZ at double data rate, just like rambus - and it's 64 bits wide instead of 16 bits. Sure, someday rambus will get its latency down, but the rest of the world won't have stood still meanwhile. >Why is AMD saying Athlon will move towards DDR SDRAM Because for VC DRAM, there's nothing to "move towards". VC DRAM at 100 and 133 MHZ is already supported by the new VIA chipset. This is possibly why Intel was so hysterical about VIA. VIA's support of VC DRAM 133 in the same time frame as rambus's initial release makes it difficult to trumpet rambus as a performance leader - and it certainly doesn't look as though it's going to be a price leader. VC is already here, you can buy it now, and the PC motherboards that use it will ship just before, or just after, the rambus motherboards. Meanwhile DDR is Q1 00, and VC burst technology is applicable to DDR (and rambus - but rambus would have to give up some or all of their royalties) ============================================== via.com.tw Apollo KX133 Features VT8371 North Bridge 200MHz Alpha EV6 FSB for the AMD Athlon processor 66/100/133MHz memory bus settings Supports PC133, PC100, VC SDRAM, and EDO DRAM types in mixed combinations up to a total of 2.0GB AGP 2X/4X ATA-33/66 Concurrent CPU and AGP access AC-97 link for audio/modem 4 USB ports, UHCI compliant Integrated IO/APIC Hardware monitoring Advanced mobile power management and clock stop features PC98/99 compliant 516 BGA VT8371 North Bridge 352 BGA VT82C686A South Bridge =============================================== >Dan, just wait. I'm sure at the Intel Developer's Forum later this month, there will be official benchmarks for DRDRAM. There had better be, I think a lot of people are tired of waiting. Look, I'm not trying to say that rambus is "dead". Intel will make sure that it has some future in PC's, at least for awhile. Rambus has captured the video game market, is making good progress in video cards, and as I said in a recent message - how about HDTV? - But I think that the near term prospects for rambus hinge upon this single issue: to what degree is Intel willing to lock itself into a rambus only strategy. Given Intel's enormous rambus investment, it has much to gain by sticking with rambus, and much to lose if it doesn't. What I've been trying to show is that, for price/performance reasons, this isn't the certain outcome that some people think it is. The big question for discussion IMHO: is it worth it for Intel to exclude everything but rambus in all future products? I'd like to see more discussion about just how much Intel stands to lose if it accepts alternatives to rambus. If the loss is too great, then intel sticks with rambus and intel's market power will insure that rambus does very well - even in the near term. The discussion about rambus's huge performance benefit that guarantees market acceptance at any price - that's what I don't think makes sense. Regards, Dan