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

To: jhg_in_kc who wrote (28931)	9/7/1999 10:06:00 PM
From: Jdaasoc	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

kc: Servers use GB of memory. desktops use MB's of RAM. DDR typically uses 32 chips in a bank. RDRAM can function with just 1 RDRAM chip. If you multply chips times capacity and you get memory upgrade bumps. With 128mb chips that will be 512 Mbytes of RAM per bank for a hypothetical DDR system. NOW FOR THE NEWS biz.yahoo.com S.Korea Samsung mass produces smaller Rambus DRAMs SEOUL, Sept 8 (Reuters) - The world's top memory chip maker Samsung Electronics Co said on Wednesday it had begun shipping high-speed Rambus dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips to the world's major personal computer makers. The new chips, which it said form the second generation of Rambus DRAMs, are produced using a 0.19 micron design rule and are 30 percent smaller than the conventional ones, Samsung said. The South Korean company, a flagship unit of the Samsung Group [SAGR.CN], said it aimed to sell some $250 million worth of the chips this year and more than $2 billion worth next year. Rambus DRAMs adopt a high-speed memory technology format that Rambus Inc (Nasdaq:RMBS - news) developed and licensed to major chipmakers. Samsung Electronics is the world's largest DRAM maker and also makes consumer electronics goods and telecommunications equipment

To: jhg_in_kc who wrote (28931)	9/8/1999 12:02:00 AM
From: grok	Respond to of 93625

RE: "<high granularity> why is this good for desktops but not for servers? anyone? eom" It is not really good for much of anything in PCs at this particular point in time. But, in the future, it is expected to be very important in small systems. Today, most computers talk to memory across 64 wires. The most popular type of memory chip has 16 wires so 4 of these are used together to form 64 wires. But you really can't have less than 4 memory chips or there'd be nothing to drive some of the 64 wires. The Rambus Direct Rdram memory chip is designed differently so that it talks to the rest of the computer across only 16 wires and, so, you can have only 1 memory chip if that's all the memory you need. Granularity means the amount of variation in the memory size that you can have. In the former case you must have a total memory that is a multiple of 4 but in the Rambus case it can be 1, 2, 3, ... In about 1988 or 89 Mark Horowitz and Mike Farmwald told me that they were thinking about forming a company based on revising the dram interface to provide a narrow, high speed interface. They explained it and asked what I thought. I told them that electrically it seemed pretty hairy but if they could solve that then in about 5 years it would be great due to the granularity problem. Well I missed that by a lot. At that time I never would have dreamed that I'd be sitting in my den typing this message on a PC with 256 MB. The amount of memory in a computer has sky rocketed incredibly. This is usually blamed on Microsoft for their inefficient software. (Not really fair.) Also, the amount of memory on a memory chip has not grown as fast as expected. 10 years ago all the dram makers were showing charts that predicted that the most popular memory in the year 2000 would be 1 Gbit (a billion bits) but actually it will be 128 Mbits maybe switching to 256 Mbits near the end of the year. In any case, the "granularity wall" in PCs is still in the future. In certain other products like Consumer Game Consoles or Graphics Cards we are there now. In PCs it's not clear just when it will happen. But you can get some good arguments going just by bring it up!