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

To: dumbmoney who wrote (28574)	9/2/1999 7:50:00 PM
From: pompsander	Respond to of 93625

I like that article. Intel says "we support this technology. What do you vendors need to make it a go. Cooperate among yourselves and determine standards and we, Intel, will provide the chipset support whichever way you go". Two of you want to go one way, and three another? Fine, we'll support it". Just make it RDRAM, not SDRAM

To: dumbmoney who wrote (28574)	9/2/1999 8:09:00 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 93625

dumbmoney, This section had some interesting comments: ----------------------- Jay Bell, a senior fellow at Dell Computer Corp. (Austin, Texas), said that based on Dell's experience, system vendors should "pay close attention to your pcb [printed-circuit board] supplier." Dell is expected to put a line of Rambus-based desktops on the market in October, and Bell said he expects demand to be strong from big corporations that use PCs in large networks. As companies buy new desktops based on the Windows 2000 operating system, most will opt for Rambus models that will provide performance headroom for three years on average, he said. Bell said Dell estimates that by mid-2000, fully half the DRAMs it buys will be Rambus parts. One advantage of Rambus' extra memory bandwidth, Bell said, is that IT managers can run data backups, virus checkers and other "touches" to the networked PCs while the user continues to work with applications. An IT manager could run a Laplink connection to a desktop and still leave the user with 85 percent of the system performance during a data backup, he said. A similarly configured system with SDRAM would leave only 67 percent of the available performance to the user, causing many to try to reboot their systems. [This is an interesting application/need we've never discussed] Bell showed preliminary benchmarks, running a test of Microsoft's Office2000 suite on a desktop in a networked environment. On Rambus systems, Microsoft Word ran significantly faster but other applications, such as Excel, actually ran slower than on SDRAM PCs. [Scary] While several system OEMs had prototype Rambus desktops on display at IDF, there were few benchmark comparisons between the Rambus and PC100 or PC133 desktops. Benchmarks won't be widely available until the commercial rollout in October, an Intel spokesman said. MacWilliams said he expects Rambus systems to deliver at least a third more usable bandwidth than an SDRAM-based system. The 1.6-Gbyte/second peak bandwidth for the full-speed RDRAMs compares with a peak bandwidth of 1.06 Gbytes/s for the PC133 SDRAMs. "By tuning the system, we can get 90 percent effective bandwidth [compared with peak]," against about 60 to 70 percent for SDRAMs, MacWilliams said. "Overall, RDRAMs offers about 30 to 33 percent more bandwidth for memory-intensive applications." Dave