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

To: unclewest who wrote (28880)	9/7/1999 10:20:00 AM
From: Mkilloran	Respond to of 93625

uncle....INTC will have 1GHZ machines in year 2000. Any reason not to think we will see 2 GHZ machines by 2002 and 3-4 GHZ machines by 2004????????? Now does everyone see why faster memory is needed for these future machines. Look for future operating systems and advanced applications to require much more memory in the future.. (Windows 2000 ,,,256kb),,,may be 512KB by 2004. Rambus is just starting....the future is bright.

To: unclewest who wrote (28880)	9/7/1999 10:25:00 AM
From: Allen champ	Respond to of 93625

From the Register Posted 07/09/99 2:43pm by Alan Stanley Memory Life's a Roller Coaster! The roller coaster ride continues. Just two months ago anybody that had to sell memory was complaining that there was a glut of memory in the market. Now, look what's happened, a sad lack of abundance. Nitto, nil, diddlysquat, sums up the state of play in today's memory market. Six weeks ago I was asked where I thought the price would be going in the following month. Ha, I said, we are at $5.00 a 64Mb DRAM now. The price will probably rise; it will go up to as much as $6.00. An astronomical price rise in itself, and one that many would never have been believed would happen. Anybody that had predicted it and actually believed that it would happen would have gone on a wild buying spree. But we did not see it. Users have been used to prices falling all this year. Previously, you would seriously question having to pay the same price that you paid the previous week. Most replies I got were not polite. Nobody heeded the warnings and stocked up at a slightly higher price. Well rise it did, I assured people that the $6.00 ceiling was going to sort the market out, that everybody would be happy and we would reach equilibrium. What has in fact been witnessed though has astounded most. Nobody really seems to know exactly what has happened, but at the time of writing, a 64Mb DRAM was difficult to find at $8.00. Amazingly enough a 33 per cent price rise in four weeks is difficult to believe. Hard to grasp for some, others however will remember the days of the Japanese plastics factory fire. A five per cent price rise in two to three days. That mini crisis pushed prices up for 3 months. Manufacturing output has been reduced. Worldwide memory overproduction was flooding the market, resulting in constantly falling prices. The manufacturers had their fingers burnt. Some stopped DRAM production altogether. Others cut back production. The problem was that they were not making money. I have been accused in the past of suggesting price rigging by manufacturers. What people do not understand is that new products don't just happen. New products take many years and millions and millions of dollars to produce. What use is a semiconductor industry that does not make a profit? If we all want bigger, better, faster computers we have to allow these people to make a living. A good living, because profit is needed to finance research and development. So what holds for the future? There has to be a let up in the constant price rises. But they will only occur if and when DRAM produces increase their output. After the lessons they have learnt in the past, it might not be the easiest thing to do. You just can't turn on a tap and double the output of DRAM. Most manufacturers are on allocation, something that three months ago we didn't think possible. They do not (or say they don't) have product stockpiles around the world in warehouses. OEM customers are still getting supplies that they have committed to take from the DRAM manufacturers. What there is very little of is opportune business. You cannot telephone a DRAM OEM today, order some product and expect delivery this side of December. So what's the outcome of all this for the memory user? Well there is a marked decrease in the amount of gray market product. Meaning better quality and stable prices within a defined high and low of about five percent unlike the 20 odd per cent differences that we experienced earlier this year. Prices may continue to rise as the market adjusts itself to the new found levels. Just think of it in the way that you are now paying for all the cheap product that you purchased earlier this year. DRAM OEM's now have to gross 45 per cent more to pay for their losses and leave them with a positive balance sheet before the year 2000. © Alan Stanley is UK managing director of Danelec

To: unclewest who wrote (28880)	9/7/1999 10:26:00 AM
From: grok	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Yes, the Alpha 21364 looks like a hella beast. It was presented at Microprocessor Forum 11 months ago and I have been telling people about it on the AMD thread for quite some time. SInce it has FOUR rambus ports directly on the CPU it avoids chip set delays altogether. One thing new in the post you referenced is this: "Terry Shannon, editor of Shannon knows Compaq,which specialises in the arena, said he thought the projections looked accurate. He said it was likely that the 21364 would also incorporate support for CPU lockstepping." The CPU lockstepping is very important for highend servers and, in my opinion, has been one of the reasons that Rambus has been scoring a goose egg there. It's not clear how the Alpha guys would achieve this lockstepping since it would seem that the Rambus channel would have to travel to the other CPU which I'd think would be electrically a big no-no. But maybe we'll find out more about this since it seems that info is starting to flow again on 21364 after being quiet for some time.