To: kash johal who wrote (29299 ) 9/12/1999 5:17:00 AM From: Bilow Respond to
Hi kash johal; Regarding me selling rambus a tad short. I think we are in reasonably close agreement regarding rambus's chances in the various segments you mentioned.<<For video and gamings apps - it seems it is clearly superior.>> Depends on the application. The problem is that at the low end, eDRAM is taking design wins, and at the high end, SGRAM or DDR SGRAM is gaining share, particularly for relatively small volume production. But RDRAM would definitely be a defensible alternative.<<For Desktops - I can see arguments both ways. but with new apps driving memory bandwidth - I can see a Rambus winner or at least 30-70% market share.>> This is where we disagree most, I think. The low end market can't afford all the RDRAM add-on costs, and as soon as you get a larger amount of memory, the bandwidth disadvantage of competing technologies goes away.<<For servers - I see Rambus as pretty much dead except for workstation apps - at least for a few years.>> Agreed.<<Notebooks - seems to me a tough sell.>> I think notebooks are an easier sell than desktops. The question is one of power consumption, and also, perhaps, just how much bandwidth performance is required out of a laptop. But in NAP or power down mode, RDRAM doesn't use much more power than other techniques. The best thing for notebooks is that they typically have less memory than desktops, and so the granularity advantage that RDRAM has at a given bandwidth requirement comes to bear. The one issue is power consumption, and my guess is that most notebooks spend most of their time in idle. This is also true, by the way, for most desktops.
