Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (7022)	9/25/1999 4:12:00 PM
From: Uncle Frank	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

>> Intel is a hugely significant link in the company's value chain. I've now come to realize how dependent Intel is on Rambus. Mike, I think you are 180 degrees out of phase. Your comments are a tribute to Apollo's passion and eloquence; imo, you are describing a classic Story Stock. The danger is that you are only looking at one version of the story; a darker one could be spun as well. Gorilla gaming has taught me to listen to the tale, but to delay pulling the trigger until the product is well inside the Tornado. If a Gorilla game emerges, the loss of initial opportunity is a small price to pay - I think of it as cheap insurance. That's why I haven't jumped on the gmst bandwagon yet. Now let's look at memory from a GG perspective. This is not a new sector by any means, but it hasn't been a Gorilla sector since the days of Dr. Wang's ipr on core memory. Semiconductor memory has developed through a series of continuous innovations, moving from flip flops to shift registers to fpm memory to edo memory to sdram memory. The Memory Cartel (guys like Samsung, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Micron) seem to fight each other for market share, but cross license each other, and peacefully go about the business of turning sand into boringly repetitive semiconductor structures. Memory is a commodity, and the game is of the Royalty persuasion. Intel's play has been to back an innovative memory/cpu architecture, pressure the box makers to adopt it, which should force the Cartel to support it. They are attempting to create an artificial tornado and change the game from Royalty to Gorilla. The Cartel has never been happy about this, and has dragged their heels. Why do you think Intel sanctified PC133? Imo, it was purely pressure from their value chain. The outcome of this soap opera is far from being decided, and rmbs is still an unidentifiable critter. I'm going to stay far away from it until I can discern a predictable result. uf

To: Mike Buckley who wrote (7022)	9/26/1999 1:22:00 PM
From: gue	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

I've now come to realize how dependent Intel is on Rambus. Mike, Good point. I found that this post from Tom Warren (an investment partner of Stuart Steele, who owns a percentage of RMBS - somewhere in the high single digits, I believe) provides another good explanation of how Intel depends on RMBS: Message 9907923 "Intel pursues rambus to keep the cpu the bottleneck in the system. Any premium users will pay for performance, will be paid to the keeper of the bottleneck. If Intel allows the market to segment on dram performance, then some or all of the performance premium will flow to the maker of the faster dram. In other words the optimal situation for Intel is for dram to be faster than they need in any segment and for it to be a commodity (undifferentiated)." gue P.S. Great thread! Been lurking for a while. I'd like to thank everyone for the generous contribution of their time and expertise.