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

To: TST who wrote (31879)	10/9/1999 6:38:00 PM
From: grok	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

RE: <kZ, as I see it you are making three points above. 1st, Rambus technology for PC application is not a good one.> I believe Rambus is not appropriate technology for the PC industry including Workstations and servers. It is best for systems smaller than PCs like Games which use smaller memories so that Rambus' granularity advantage is a factor. For example, if you had a product that only needed 16MBytes of memory then that could be satisfied with only one 128Mbit Rdram chip while it would require 4 Sdrams if the 16bit wide chips were used or 2 Sdrams if 32bit wide chips were used. Rdrams also save pins which is a good thing. But neither granularity or pin saving is a dominating advantage in the PC business and they will not overcome Rambus' weaknesses. Memory demand in PCs continues to sky rocket and Microporcessors and chip sets all the way back to the 486 found enough pins for a 64Bit data bus and they can continue to find the pins especially since pin count per package is growing also. The flip side of the advantage of granularity and pin saving is that Rambus reads 16 bytes of data inside an Rdram and then ships them out at very high speed over a narrow, two byte interface to the chip set which then expands them back to 8 bytes and ships them over to the Microprocessor. This makes about as much sense as taking a four lane freeway and closing down three lanes for a short stretch but increasing the speed limit to 260 miles per hour on that stretch. Possibly you might be able to make it work but why do it? Sdrams just drive the 8 bytes directly to the chip set and it can do this easily. RE: <2nd, that any short term fix would simply prolong the obvious> There will be a short term fix to the current problem. I'm not predicting there won't be a fix and I'm absolutely certain that there will be one. It might even be a fix that is essentially free. I'm not saying that the fix will prolong the obvious. The lack of a fix is prolonging the process by which others come to realize that Rambus is a mistake. As long as there is no fix people just wait for the fix. After the fix arrives they have to actually start living with Rambus. That's when people will start learning.

To: TST who wrote (31879)	10/9/1999 6:57:00 PM
From: grok	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

RE: <Now I might be off here, but it sounds like your against Intel\Rambus planning for the future of the PC industry. But KC isn't someone always planning for the PC industry? If it were not these guys surely some other companies would be & in fact are. It sounds so dark.> The great thing about the PC industry is that everyone is planning and fighting it out to succeed with their plans. The whole turns out to be greater than the sum of the parts and it evolves in ways that usually improve things for everyone. The hard drive people are maniacs in competing with each other but they keep bring the price per megabyte lower and lower. The same has been true of the dram makers. However, now they have "help" from Intel. Watch out! RE: <But, what if they succeed? You know KZ it might actually help everyone to solve this decades old memory problem. A perfect solution, hardly. Improvement not perfection, right!> You'll have to explain this decades old memory problem to me. In the last 30 years the dram industry has brought the price from $0.01 per bit to $0.0000001 per bit. They've been doing their job and can continue to do it by moving from PC100 to PC133 to DDR200 to DDR266 and on to DDR-II, etc while maintaining the lowest possible price per bit. However, all that is now threatened by Intel deciding to help the Dram makers out by forcing them to do Rambus. RE: <Maybe I just got what you are trying to say all wrong, but it sounded different today, it seemed as if you were concerned that Intel\Rambus might succeed.> I'm sure that Rambus will succeed in some areas like Games. They'll probably hang on in part of the PC business too and may find a PC niche. I wouldn't have any problem with any of this if Intel would just provide support for both memory types and let them fight it out. Maybe it would even cause one of the types to get better and then win. But just forcing Rambus on the PC world is a big mistake. RE: <But I need to watch my words too. I was wrong to come down on you so hard & for that I apologize. I wish you all the best in your new retirement & a much deserved rest I'm sure.> I sincerely thank you for that.