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

To: wily who wrote (28767)	9/6/1999 9:00:00 PM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

>>the 4th quarter begins in 3 weeks.<< And it ends in 16 weeks. (i.e., production could start anywhere within that time frame) wily, this news is dated 8/30...are we both wrong? on 8/30, next month is this month. maybe you and kz can help me understand this one <just kidding...i hope you both know that>. does this mean 1.5 million of each of two types each month beginning this month?... this is really going to cause some work for dan...it throws all of his projections off. he was figuring on 1.5 million total for the rest of the year. not that difficult to figure out...according to this we can just multiply dan's estimates by eight and get the picture. unclewest wonder what they mean by major pc makers as customers? help me there too please. 1999/08/30(Mon) 19:21 Samsung Electronics decided to start the mass production of 128M/144M direct rambus DRAM(DR DRAM) next month. The chipmaker plans to release 1.5 million units monthly in the last quarter of the year and extend the monthly production capacity to 3 million units by March, 2000. Samsung revealed it had already secured major PC makers as its customers. According to the plan, Samsung is manufacturing the product on trial at its recently opened 9th production line. source: South Korea Times

To: wily who wrote (28767)	9/6/1999 11:01:00 PM
From: wily	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

I asked Carl a few questions on the Micron thread because I respect his usually unique views. I think the part about the PC OEM's will be very important as they will ultimately drive demand. Message 11172169 Sure, I'll be happy to state my opinions on conversion to RDRAM, but they are just opinions. First let's establish my underlying premises: 1. In a PC environment, RDRAM provides no measurable performance advantages over PC133 SDRAM when combined with a L1/L2 cache except for highly unusual applications. Most programs do significant amounts of loops and the cache hit rates run about 90% or better, so for those programs any advantage would be reduced by 90%. I knew a guy once who had a special program with a single 16mb loop that was executed over and over, and for his application faster memory bandwidth would provide a linear improvement in overall run times. For most applications the difference will be in the 1-2% range, if at all. 2. While it is true that with RDRAM there are savings that come from pin reductions and from an elimination of L2 cache, the overall cost of a system with RDRAM main memory will be significantly higher than the overall cost of an SDRAM system. 3. Memory makers (including MU) could produce RDRAM in quantity if the demand exists, though the price will need to be significantly higher than the price of SDRAM in order to motivate them to do so. 4. Intel is committed to RDRAM. 5. Consumers are stupid. Based on these premises my opinion is that the RDRAM conversion will be interesting. Companies that do a fair amount of R&D and that are known to be independent thinkers, such as CPQ and IBM, are no doubt well aware of the lack of performance gains from RDRAM and the excess costs, and they will be somewhat slow to offer much in the RDRAM area, except perhaps in servers and workstations. On the other hand, companies strictly follow the Intel line such as Dell will probably do what Intel tells them to do and offer RDRAM at once broadly across the product line. If I am correct, RDRAM will then become a marketing issue, to be decided by the consumer, with assistance from magazines. I don't put much faith in consumers, and I suspect that 500MHz RDRAM will sound more impressive to them that PC133 SDRAM, and since 500 is greater than 133 they will assume that the system with RDRAM is 4 times as fast. If consumers are as stupid as I think they are, RDRAM has a fighting chance. As for your other questions, yes I presume that MU still hates Rambus, but that they will make whatever chips are the most profitable. Any production of RDRAM automatically reduces SDRAM output, but presumably the price will be high enough that revenue would rise. I have no comments on your other questions. Carl