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

To: DRBES who wrote (73567)	9/30/1999 7:31:00 PM
From: Petz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1573207

Fabs stopping RDRAM production: techweb.com "With another delay of a key Intel chip set for enabling Direct Rambus DRAMs in PCs, Rambus systems havemissed the window for the Christmas selling season, analysts said, potentially costing PC makers tens of millions, possibly hobbling the upcoming launch of Intel's next version of the Pentium III, and causing at least one DRAM maker to halt production of Rambus parts. Here's a summary of the article w.r.t. memory manufacturers: Samsung - no more wafer starts because of Camino delay Fujitsu - had already decided to pass on RDRAM Hitachi - said it will hold off on ramping RDRAM production pending more solid information about Camino's launch Here's some other quotes: "There will be no more wafer starts for RDRAM until we can better understand how long it will take to resolve the Camino situation," said Avo Kanadjian, vice president for memory marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, San Jose, Calif. "Any capacity that can be freed up will be reassigned to 128-Mbit or 256-Mbit SDRAM products. We will require some convincing before we restart any RDRAM production." Kanadjian said the company's current RDRAM inventory and the work now in progress totals some 100,000 Rambus chips. If Intel cannot identify the bugs in its chip set soon, he said, that should be enough to supply PC OEMs through the end of the year. And by shifting to SDRAM, the company could pump an additional million SDRAM chips into the channel by year's end, he said. ... One analyst estimated that if OEMs have to scrap their existing Rambus motherboards, it could cost them $10 million based on an estimated 100,000 boards. But another source said as many as 500,000 Rambus boards may have already been manufactured based on orders of key components. ... "Intel has told us the delay is indefinite," Kanadjian said. "It is preferable if they could give us some kind of schedule so we can plan our own mix, but I think it's clear that they have already missed two delivery dates and they want to be certain that the next one is 100 percent achievable." Intel had originally planned to roll out the Camino last spring, but said in February that the schedule would be pushed out for three months. The latest problem scrapped the second planned launch. "This certainly hurts Intel's credibility," Garber said. "Two delays is very serious." While this delay is embarrassing, the real test will come later this month when the company is expected to roll out the 0.18-micron version of its Pentium III, code-named Coppermine, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64, Saratoga, Calif. That chip will also integrate the Level 2 cache, which generally brings about a 10 percent performance gain over similar chips running at the same clock speed but with off-chip cache. Brookwood said Coppermine is the chip most PC vendors expected to really activate the Rambus rush. "If Intel can't correct the Camino situation before the Coppermine debut, that will really throw a wrench into their plans," he said. "[Intel] doesn't even know yet what the problem is. This is an embarrassment to be sure." ... "This is going to have a strong impact on our sales," said Dean Hays, director of marketing at Via's U.S. subsidiary in Fremont, Calif. "We always say our success is based on our own execution, but the delay of Intel's 820 chip set is all gravy for us." Another chip-set maker, Reliance Computer, is said to be preparing a chip set that will support the Coppermine CPU and use DDR memories. Petz