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

To: John Walliker who wrote (29126)	9/10/1999 8:03:00 AM
From: wily	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

John, Naive question: Why does Rambus need a heat spreader if it uses less power than SDRAM? Thanks, wily

To: John Walliker who wrote (29126)	9/10/1999 9:14:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi John Walliker; In order to properly evaluate the claims on the rambus web site for the low power RIMM module, I would need a lot more data. There is a possibility that more modern RDRAM chips use less power, but I doubt that it is significant. If there is such a chip, I would appreciate a link to the data sheets, or press releases that give real engineering data, or whatever. The link posted is too short to really analyze anything. The traditional way to get a good comparison versus the competitor is to compare your current generation product with the one he was using last year. Note that PC100 is a quite nearly obsolete memory system. Seems kind of unfair to be comparing it to next year's memory system, doesn't it? They should be comparing to what will be available in 2000, not 3.3 volt chips running on a larger process, possibly even with a smaller size per chip. The other basic problem (that demonstrates the over simplistic nature of that press release) is that they do not specify which RIMM module they are comparing to what SDRAM system. As you granularity of the memory, the power consumption ratio will tilt in PC100's favor, for instance. This is because PC100 will be able to use taller chips. A real comparison needs to talk about specific memory systems, with specific chips. You need the type of comparison I just posted on this thread. -- Carl

To: John Walliker who wrote (29126)	9/10/1999 9:37:00 AM
From: grok	Respond to of 93625

RE: <That looks a very reasonable claim by Rambus on their website. After all, they are referring to system power consumption, not the maximum power consumption of individual chips.> No way, John. Rambus system power is much higher. They acknowledged ths to me several times. They make their claim by imagining some sdram system with enough extra chips operating in order to match their bandwidth and then counting the power of all the extra chips. Of course, no one would ever build such a system. Most of the laptop world will just use a straight forward PC100 or PC133 set of four x16 chips and forget about the extra bandwidth. (I think someone has announced a Rambus laptop but don't expect many.) Who needs the extra bandwidth for a laptop? (Oh, ya, backups!) But the Rambus claim of half the power is about as close to a baldfaced lie as you can get.