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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (5611)	8/30/1999 12:54:00 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

I think that what has Frank and me on the edge is: 1: We have very good plays going elsewhere: 2: Intel totally controls the situation. If they say no, Rambus is down the tubes.

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (5611)	8/30/1999 2:07:00 PM
From: Apollo	Respond to of 54805

Unq: rdram has not yet crossed the Chasm, but this is a unique situation; the most powerful of the Enabling Gorillas is creating the Tornado for a member of its own value chain. I am not aware of any precedent which would allow us to to evaluate this scenario, and the manual doesn't address it. Appreciate your comments above, as well as your concerns about memory alternatives sans royalty payments. I think any memory alternative as good as DRDRAM that may be developed will take a lot of time, and its potential benefits will be broadcast well in advance, to permit a safe exit. It really is a race between how well and how deeply Rambus can be embedded in the High Tech industry products before a reasonable alternative can be developed to compete. After RTFM, the GG points out that the more a product becomes the de facto standard, the less eager everybody is to change. We need a couple years for Rambus to become deeply embedded; prior to this, its gorilla-hood will be less than guaranteed. I agree it is not a "no-brainer". Stan

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (5611)	8/30/1999 10:50:00 PM
From: Mike Buckley	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 54805

the most powerful of the Enabling Gorillas [Intel] is creating the Tornado for a member [Rambus] of its own value chain. I am not aware of any precedent which would allow us to to evaluate this scenario, and the manual doesn't address it. Great point, Frank. For newer participants in our folder, the same thing is going on with the relationship between Microsoft and Citrix. The difference (in my opinion) is that Citrix's product has crossed the chasm. I wouldn't be surprised, though, to see Rambus's product get to the tornado before Citrix's product does. On the other hand, if Citrix's product does get to the tornado, I think it will become more self-sufficient, mostly because it is more discontinous than Rambus's product. I don't understand technology enough to know, but my superficial impression is that Rambus's product is not particularly discontinuous. It strikes me more as a continuous innovation that happens to be by far the better mouse trap. Does anyone have thoughts about that? --Mike Buckley

To: Uncle Frank who wrote (5611)	8/31/1999 9:27:00 PM
From: Secret_Agent_Man	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

I re-iterate...APPLE!Merced is Intel's first chip that processes 64 bits of data at a time, rather than 32 bits, which should greatly boost its power when using specially designed software. Significantly, the prototype was shown running an early 64-bit version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2000 operating system, another long-delayed product expected to be crucial to both companies' success in high-end computers. The Merced chip also ran a 64-bit version of the Linux operating system, the free program that is growing in popularity. Intel's slow progress in finishing the long-delayed Merced has been a source of frustration in the personal-computer industry. ROFL, maybe when the middle of next year gets here APPLE will have the G-5 processor running @ 1Gig and doing 512bs The Velocity Engine The secret of the G4's revolutionary performance is its aptly named Velocity Engine. It's the heart of a supercomputer miniaturized onto a sliver of silicon. The Velocity Engine can process data in 128-bit chunks, instead of the smaller 32-bit or 64-bit chunks used in traditional processors (it's the 128-bit vector processing technology used in scientific supercomputers—except that we've added 162 new instructions to speed up computations). Think APPLE ...