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

To: grok who wrote (29545)	9/15/1999 1:05:00 AM
From: geedub17	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Favorable Comments in October Computer Shopper! The October issue of Computer Shopper has a couple of articles favorable to RDRAM. -Bandwidth Inside-, pg. 157; & -CPUs Race the Clock-, pg. 323. I could not find the articles on their online site, so I copied some of the text below: Bandwidth Inside- is almost entirely about the "revved up" 820 chipset. It goes on to describe its advantages as "133 MHz system bus, and support for a new type of fast memory called Rambus DRAM". It then mentions AGP-4X & ATA/66, and quotes Dell's marketing manager for the Dimension line as saying "this four-way tuneup yields an overall performance gain of 7-10% over a similarly configured 440BX system." And, "Industry benchmarks don't test concurrent processing, which the new chipset supports, so actual gains could be greater." Intel's Ferron-Jones is quoted as saying " ...its 133 MHz front-side bus & RDRAM combined yield almost 150% the bandwidth of a comparable system with 100 MHz SDRAM." And, "...enables data speeds of 1GB/s between the processor and memory controller hub, whereas a 100 MHz system bus on the 440BX chipset moves data at a comparatively pokey 520 MB/s." It says Gateway & Dell will "stoke their high-end desktops with the 820 immediately" but Micron will use VIA hardware instead. Other supportive statements are throughout the article; however, also with some references to the temporary higher cost. CPUs Race...- is more about Intel vs. AMD, Cyrix, VIA, etc. but does talk about PIII & Athlon supporting "...AGP, fast new RDRAM, the upcoming superfast PCI bus, and more." FWIW (long since Jan.) -GWD

To: grok who wrote (29545)	9/15/1999 4:33:00 AM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

KZNerd, <Can you really make any clear statement that demonstrates that the evolutionary approach could not keep up with these future killer apps if they do, in fact, actually happen?> Yes. Rambus is clearly a better solution than even DDR SDRAM. The only thing DDR SDRAM has going for it is low cost and a less complicated memory controller design. DDR has its own problems, such as large pin count and inefficient use of the memory channel. <Tench, The dram industry moved from PC66 to PC100 because it was a free upgrade due to normal Moore's law scaling just like the one currently underway to PC133.> Let's back up a little. Why did the industry shift from EDO DRAM to SDRAM? If I recall correctly, SDRAM provided very little benefit over EDO at the time. It was certainly costlier and tougher to implement, and the web sites were recommending that people not go all out and swap their motherboards just to get SDRAM. The answer is obvious. SDRAM, with its clock synchronized to a common clock from the memory controller (hence the 'S' in SDRAM), was a much better and forward-looking solution that the asynchronous signals of EDO or FPM DRAM. One coworker of mine, an engineer (i.e. not a marketing guy), said that when you transition memory technologies, you always have to go over a big hump. And he's speaking from experience, too. EDO to SDRAM, PC66 to PC100, and now RDRAM. The only difference is that this time, people are trying to make that routine big hump look like the Berlin Wall. Tenchusatsu