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

To: Dave B who wrote (29882)	9/19/1999 2:41:00 AM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Here's an article on the game consoles (from March) with some projections for volumes. They may or may not still be current. Also, a couple of items -- this article says that Sony expects to ship the PS II in Japan in March of 2000 (and don't forget, this article is from last March). I thought we had more current announcements that it was going to be this (next?) Fall in Japan. It's interesting that the latest announcments that it wouldn't happen in Japan until early 2000 line up more with this article from 6 months ago. Second item -- an ARM processor, a USB port, a FireWire port? This is really starting to sound like a computer. Dave LSI, Rambus Get PlayStation II Approval. (Company Business and Marketing) Electronic News (1991), March 8, 1999 v45 i2260 p22(1) Author Brown, Peter Full Text Tokyo-Much like today's kids, Rambus Inc. and LSI Logic Corp. know that there is only one thing better than getting a gaming console: getting two. Last week it was Christmas in March for the two companies as they both earned their second major design wins in the lucrative gaming console market. Sony-the number one vendor of video game consoles-said it would use technology from the two companies in its planned PlayStation II system. The new PlayStation II is expected to raise the bar of video game console performance with a 128-bit graphics system and high-speed memory. However, Sony now is in a race to see who will be first to release the next generation gaming console in the United States. Competitor Sega Corp. has already unveiled its DreamCast console in Japan but has yet to bring the next generation consumer appliance to the United States. Sony claims it will deliver the 128-bit PlayStation in Japan in March of 2000 and deliver it to the United States in the Fall of that same year at a price of $420. The other major competitor in the console business, Nintendo, likely will have some sort of an upgrade to its Nintendo 64 platform ready by that time as well. LSI's contribution to the PlayStation II is the I/O processor ASIC, which consists of a 32-bit MIPS microprocessor core, a Universal Serial Bus host controller core, an IEEE 1394 link core, and a physical layer core. The chip also will provide backwards compatibility, allowing gamers to play previous generation software products on the 128-bit console, said Dennis Jow, product marketing manager for the console product line at LSI, Milpitas, Calif. Rambus, Mountain View, Calif., will provide the 1.6 Gigabyte per second direct Rambus DRAM (D-RDRAM) memory for the console. For Rambus and LSI, the video game business has been a boon, offering hefty revenues during a tough stretch for the chip industry. Rambus got a key design win for Nintendo's Nintendo 64 and LSI had a MIPS- based ASIC in Sony's original PlayStation console. LSI and Rambus owe much of their livelihood to the video game market, according to Dale Ford, analyst at Dataquest, a market research firm based in San Jose. Before the Nintendo 64 win, Rambus struggled to get on its feet. However, the win gave the company a boost until its technology was endorsed by Intel Corp. LSI had a significant portion of its revenues wrapped up in the PlayStation while the company endured market transitions, said Ford. Both may have been worse off if not for this market, he noted. For the PlayStation II, it previously was unknown if either company was going to be inside of the gaming console. However, the gaming market now is no longer as critical to the entire puzzle as it was before for LSI. And, due to the Intel endorsement, Rambus has achieved high status in the PC market. "Rambus got its leg up thanks to video games," Ford said. "(Rambus) owes a lot to the game industry. Now that they are far more focused on the PC realm, they are no longer as reliant on this market as they were in the past." Ford said that preliminary numbers for the gaming console market have the number of units shipping last year at 30 million units, a new record for the market. The market will suffer during the coming 128- bit transition and the numbers won't be as high until the year 2002 where Dataquest forecasts the console market to hit 32.5 million units. Sony claims it has shipped more than 50 million units of the original PlayStation consoles. In addition to the LSI and Rambus technology, the PlayStation II will use its own internally generated graphics chip and one created by Toshiba Corp.