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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer who wrote (72346)	9/19/1999 2:03:00 PM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 1572931

Re: I hope you're not implying that Paul had any say... I may have been trolling for another iteration on 3 from Paul, I think he's pretty much exhausted basic arithmetic and a breakthrough is near. I'm looking for the use of non base 10 and, perhaps, some logarithms :-) Slightly more seriously, everytime I hear more about the lack of non-rambus support for Coppermine I get an image of that Fedex commercial where some guy is hiding under his disk while his boss is walking up and down the hall calling out his name. In this case, the guy under the desk is the one who pushed rambus. The motherboard problems were already priced into AMDs stock, and then some. I don't think a crippled launch of Coppermine due to Rambus has been priced into Intel's stock. It would be coming at the worst possible time too, since inevitable comparisons will be made with Athlon, which should be streaming a series of "problem solved" reports of new motherboards and volume system availability at that point. This seems probable since chipset and motherboard variations are more straightforward than new CPUs and radically new memory technologies. Not saying it's going to happen for sure, but AMD could enter the next millenium wearing the halo of "the company that executes" in comparison to "that other X86 CPU outfit". Wouldn't be fair, of course, especially since the rambus production wasn't under Intel's control, but things changes so quickly in high tech and judgements can be harsh. I would expect this to ultimately be no worse than a black eye for Intel, but it could turn into a serious skull fracture for Rambus. Dan

To: Elmer who wrote (72346)	9/19/1999 3:05:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1572931

Elmer, In theory rambus does work and the prototypes worked and there was a need for faster memory to merely keep up with the CPU speeds...so Intel took a calculated risk that it would all mesh when the time came. I think they did have an alternate plan in mind, just in case, but they downplayed it so as to avoid killing Rambus' stock price. This lends credence to the speculations about some higher ups holding Rambus shares or options etc as some have mentioned. We may never know the truth of that. In any event publicly grooming a rambus escape path would have cut 50% of rambus' share price....this may happen?..but RAM prices have increased and that helps rambus by shrinking the differential....will the differential appear again?, as rambus is driven higher by the same ram shortages? Remember the reasons Rambus costs more(apart from a royalty) is the greater difficulty in making them, that difficulty will remain and as other memory climbs will make them demand the equivalent margins and so rambus will climb with other ram. Countering this is the experience curve that tends to bring rambus down so they will not track perfectly, they will converge to a degree, but an absolute differerntial will remain, caused by the royalties and the extra fab and test steps. Bill