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To: Charles R who wrote (64)	9/18/1999 1:14:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 271

Charles and thread, Re: "Rambus et al" Well as I am the only seriously long person on Rambus let me explain why. First, I think we are all pretty much in agreement on Rambus TECHNICALLY. The performance improvement in "real world" apps will be minimal at best. Although certain limited apps may show gains : gaming, voice recognition etc. So on an engineering basis Rambus is CLEARLY a BUST. However customers do not buy based on a detailed engineeering analysis. For example folks are buying high speed Athlons (i hope) plus high speed PIII's in huge volumes when a $50 Celeron 400 is adequate. And yet folks pay a $700-800 delta in end system price for no real gains for everyday apps. As a consumer, I know that when i buy a shirt with a stupid RL logo I am paying $60 for an item that i could get for sub $20 if it didn't have this logo. Folks buy Coke and Pepsi - even though the generic supermarket brand IS IDENTICAL and bottled at the same place. My wife drives a Landcruiser to shuttle the kids around and to to do grocery shopping and occasional family trips. On an engineering basis - completely stoopid. Way too expensive,inefficent etc. So the power of marketing and branding is being missed here in this discussion. There WILL be a FIRESTORM of ads touting the new PC 600-PC 800 memory with the 133Mhz bus. And these machines will be fully loaded - best 4x AGP graphics cards, fastest disks etc, In Q4 only a small percentage of such systems will be available and they will be snapped up IMHO. Later as prices come down they will capture maybe 30-60% of desktop space in next 2-3 years IMHO. The CLEAR facts are that consumers DESIRE the latest whizbang products and are willing to buy them. And once an expensive brand is identified and prices come down more and more consumers buy the better brand. Graphics today is an excellent example. Most folks I know just use 1024x768 or even 800x600 on their graphics cards and use their PCs for software development, mS office apps, web-cruising etc and NEVER play any 3d games. And yet I challenge any of you to buy a DELL/COMPAQ/GTW/HP/IBM PC machine that doesn't come with an awesome grapics card which is way overkill for apps. So yes rambus performance will suck and it is too expensive today. But with the huge branding behind it I see it as a big financial winner. regards, kash

To: Charles R who wrote (64)	9/18/1999 1:19:00 PM
From: grok	Respond to of 271

RE: <I guess most people would have made the same choice as Intel did in 1995-6 (w.r.t. picking RDRAM). Planning multiple years out in this industry is fraught with perils. Looks like where they went wrong is the arrogance they have displayed in trying to jam the technology down peoples throats and not planning for backups. Chuck> I know I would have made the same choice in 1996. And I would have been dead wrong. As for the backups consider this: I believe that Intel is (or at least was) convinced that IA-64 is the future. But they made sure that IA-32 is strongly supported and will continue to be strongly supported for ever and ever until it can be dropped with no impact and no risk. (I realize that the Willamette delay weakens my argument here but that is another story.) They would never allow their nearly $300B mkt cap be threatened by any rivalries on IA-64 vs IA-32. But somehow they got to believing their own propaganda on Rambus to the point that they have put at least part of the $300B on the line just to try to prove that they made the right choice in 1996. I just cannot understand how Grove/Barrett/BOD let this happen.