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

To: pompsander who wrote (32985)	10/27/1999 12:29:00 AM
From: Jdaasoc	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

pompsander: When my wife looked over my shoulder as I was writing scalability in a previous post, she said that not a word. The explanation I will give you will hopefully be more satisfactory than my wife's response to it "It's still not a word". Scalability refers to the ability of a technology to scale it's performance with increasing system speed. The best analogy I can give is that SDRAM technology is like trying to fight a fire under a condition of low water pressure(100 Mhz). No matter how many wide hoses (pins) you add to use your not going to get more water per minute. With RMBS technology, the water pressure is high (800 MhZ) even though hose is smaller. In addition, if you need water you add more 800 MHz hydrants. john

To: pompsander who wrote (32985)	10/27/1999 12:35:00 AM
From: richard surckla	Respond to of 93625

Pomp, Samsung White Paper... Of interest... Found on RAMBUS NEW WEB SITE.. skyboyd1 on Yahoo posted... usa.samsungsemi.com

To: pompsander who wrote (32985)	10/27/1999 6:03:00 AM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

pomp, i am sure the techies will correct me if i am wrong. i see rmbs as a granularity, bandwidth, and scalability advantage...the cost savings and faster speed are free extras :o) scalability and granularity are interwoven. it has to do with Mbits and MBytes, increasing speed, and adding memory...presently a 64 Mbit dram has 8 MBytes of memory. a 128 has 16. a 256 has 32 and a 512 has 64. the 64, 128, 256 and 512 refer to granularity. the 8, 16, 32, and 64 refer to MBytes of dram. rdrams can be added singly to a system...due to parallelism, sdrams must be added in pairs. this becomes quite important in the aftermarket. say granularity is at 512, and you want to add 64 MB of memory to your system. with rambus you can add one rdram. with sdram you must add two. the effect is with sdram you end up paying for much more memory (dram) than you really wanted. jdaasoc realized the importance of this some time back with timna. timna due out next year for low end pc's is expected to use 64MB of rdram. granularity at that time is expected to attain 512 MBits. this means you can get the 64 MB of rdram in a single dram. at this granularity and memory level you will be able to solder the drdam directly on. the cost savings will be quite significant. the main advantages to rambus are the cost savings for low-end, and the higher band width at the high-end, coupled with the easy upgradeability. adding channels to rambus systems will get you huge performance gains. i really like jd's analogy: Scalability refers to the ability of a technology to scale it's performance with increasing system speed. The best analogy I can give is that SDRAM technology is like trying to fight a fire under a condition of low water pressure(100 Mhz). No matter how many wide hoses (pins) you add to use your not going to get more water per minute. With RMBS technology, the water pressure is high (800 MhZ) even though hose is smaller. In addition, if you need water you add more 800 MHz hydrants. i also remember rmbs ceo's statement that they expect to increase memory speed by 100-200mhz each year. oh ya, rambus reduced pin count is important for cost savings too. i believe in the near future you will be able to move your rdram from one machine to another. even to next generation machines. as rdram production increases, prices will come down. as sdram production decreases prices will go up. i believe that the prices will cross sometime next year and sdram will be the more expensive. the continuous bickering about rmbs being expensive is kind of funny to me. at the high-end, folks are always willing to pay for performance. for the low end, on march 6, sony will release playstation II with 32 MB of rdram. this machine will perform basic household computer functions, access the internet, and be a fabulous game machine. cost <$400. this will be followed by intel's timna with rdram for the low end. btw toshiba announced last week that they are currently producing rdram for pII. hope i did not get too technical :o) unclewest