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

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (30134)	9/21/1999 11:08:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 93625

Tench, Looks like the Rambus launch is not going to go too well. No systems on sale on Monday. And super low volumes: Only 5% for Q4 99. What do u think: ____________________________________________________________ Intel faces pressure over new chipset By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com September 21, 1999, 6:15 p.m. PT The introduction of a new set of chips from Intel isn't going as smoothly as the chip manufacturer would like. On Monday, Intel will debut its new 820 chipset, the set of chips that let a CPU talk to the rest of a computer. But the debut apparently is somewhat tarnished, as some manufacturers shun the new hardware, analysts say it faces a limited market, the Rambus memory system it enables proves to be expensive, and Intel itself reduces its production plans. "Intel has significantly scaled back their short-term expectations," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst with U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray. Intel had planned for the 820 chipset to account for 20 to 25 percent of the chipsets it made, but it has reduced that number to 5 percent, he said. The adjustments aren't new to Intel as it works to balance its own plans for the innards of PCs with what the companies that build computers actually desire. For example, Intel abandoned its earlier stance and accommodated manufacturers' desires to use conventional memory running at somewhat higher speed instead of jumping straight to the next-generation Rambus memory technology. And the 820 chipset itself was delayed three months. For its part, Intel says it has billed Rambus not as a miracle cure for PC performance today but as a necessary step in coming years to be able to take advantage of ever-faster processors. "There will be a transition between SDRAM [today's conventional memory technology] and RDRAM [the Rambus technology] over the next couple years," said Intel spokesman Dan Francisco. "Ultimately, the market will decide the rate that transition takes place." Francisco declined to discuss Intel's plans for how many of the 820 chipsets it would make, but said: "The 820 is on schedule to go in late September. System manufacturers want to do systems on their own schedules." Micron avoiding the 820 Micron Electronics has decided to use a rival chipset from Via Technologies, because it allows the PC maker to get the same performance the 820 provides while cutting $200 to $300 off the price tag of a system, said product manager Robert Wheadon. The Via-based systems will show up at the top end of Micron's line in systems using 600-MHz or 533-MHz Intel chips, he said. Micron speed testing has shown that both the Via chipset and the 820 show an increase of 3 or 4 percent over current Intel chipsets in real-world tasks, Wheadon said. Regarding the performance, Francisco said Intel's position has been that customers "aren't going to see some astronomical difference." Instead, Micron is more enthusiastic about a later chipset, Intel's 840 or "Carmel" chipset, due in the first half of 2000. The Carmel chipset will have two channels the CPU can use to talk to main memory, doubling the bandwidth and making the computer better able to utilize Rambus' theoretical capacity. Scaling back 820 production The reason Intel would scale back its production plans is simply lack of demand, said MicroDesign Resources analyst Peter Glaskowsky. "It's going to be very difficult for Intel to sell a lot of those chips" because of the high price of Rambus memory. A system with the 820 chipset and 128 MB of Rambus memory will cost a manufacturer another $300 to make. He estimates that cost will translate to another $500 added to the price the end customer sees. Except for a very few people such as gamers and users or large databases, "that's a pretty much unacceptable price penalty," he said. Another price effect has been that most computer makers are likely to adopt lower-speed versions of Rambus memory, said Shawn Willett of Aberdeen Group. "I would expect most to go with the 600-MHz Rambus because of the costs associated with the 800-MHz chips and the difficulty in getting it," Willett said. Francisco didn't comment on how popular the different speeds would be, saying only that Rambus will be available and used in 600-, 700-, and 800-MHz speeds at the time of launch. news.cnet.com.