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

To: Dave B who wrote (30810)	9/27/1999 11:27:00 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 93625

Hi Dave B; I don't think Rambus RDRAM really involves anything radically new. It's a matter of the degree of margin or safety in the technology that has me convinced it will have problems. This is something I stated long before the current problems came to light. There would be no problem at all, in doing this sort of thing in supercomputers. The tolerances could be obtained by hand measuring and tweaking each board. It would run up the cost of production, but these boards could be made to work. In fact, as I have stated on this thread, I wouldn't mind owning one of the systems that are currently being rejected by Dell. But margins and tolerances and all that get back to the real problem that Rambus has (irrespective of the high power consumption, long latency, and irrelevant bandwidth), which is manufacturability. Reducing tolerances increases cost of production. This is why it costs a lot more to put a processor onto a square centimeter of silicon than it does to make an M&M peanut candy. They are both about the same size, and, considering raw materials, peanuts, sugar and chocolate cost more than sand, so why isn't the M&M cheaper? My grandfather was an engineer, and a very good one of the mechanical type. He used to say, "an engineer is someone who can do at a cost of five cents what any fool could do for a dime." In other words, engineering is not no much about designing things that work, (though Rambus does seem to be having a little difficulty with this, right now), but instead it is about doing things in a cost effective way. If we consider the position of engineering, as a part of business, it is obvious how important that cost effectiveness is. Rambus just isn't cost effective in PCs, though the previous variety was cost effective in game platforms. -- Carl