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

To: Dan3 who wrote (34082)	11/6/1999 8:19:00 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Dan3; Re RDRAM pricing versus SDRAM in the future... I keep telling you that I am a low level guy. I can figure out what transistors and wires do, what engineers and their managers do, what it costs to make things, and whether they are likely to work reliably or not, but I really don't know have a feel for high level things. High level things include what the user is going to want, how much he will pay, what the marketing people will do. I have a little understanding of what system level performance is like, but I have no doubt at all that you know a lot more about that than I do. If I had to make a total guess, I would say that Jdassoc knows more about marketing of PCs and components than either of us do. This is because that is what he does for a living, versus what you and I do for a living. I think his "position is talking", when he posts on this thread, though, and I have no doubt that he knows very little about the engineering details of cost and effectiveness. I'm quite certain that RDRAM will not be a cost effective memory solution for the vast majority of general purpose computers during 2000. If Intel succeeds in forcing it into sufficiently high volume, the extra costs would eventually decrease, but I don't think that Intel has the capability to do this. In fact, given Intel's changes in course over the last 12 months, I would say that the odds of RDRAM becoming the standard memory (and therefore the cheapest to use) has become much lower than it was before. I would say that now the "probability" is very close to zero that RDRAM will ever expand to 50% of the dynamic memory market. The basic fact is that if Intel really were willing to fall on its sword for Rambus, they wouldn't be announcing PC100 and DDR chip sets. What are those kind of announcements going to do, influence box makers to build Rambus based mother boards? I don't think so. I also don't think that this will become evident to the street, until 3 to 6 months from now. As far as RDRAM pricing goes, I don't know whether the excess production (which caused the memory makers to quit making the chips) is currently causing the memory makers to offer them cheap, or if they will run into a supply glut in the future. RDRAMs could become cheap because they become a standard, or they could become cheap because nobody wants them. The thing to watch, I think, is the memory makers. If they start announcing that they are quitting making SDRAM (and, more importantly, DDR SDRAM) and starting up RDRAM wafers, then it is good news for Rambus. Until then, it is clear that the industry expects Rambus to be a dead issue. It is possible that the memory makers would turn on the RDRAM production without making an announcement, though I would think that Rambus would make one for them... -- Carl