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

To: Zeev Hed who wrote (35216)	11/26/1999 3:16:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Zeev Hed; Re performance per dollar and all that... I didn't mean to say that higher performance can't be sold, even though it is provided at a higher price (in terms of performance per dollar), though my post undoubtedly looked like that. Instead, what I was trying to say is that for any given level of performance, engineers generally choose the cheapest way to get to that level of performance, and that Rambus does not provide the cheapest way of getting to that level of performance, as required in modern PCs. For different levels of performance it is possible that different technologies will provide the cheapest way of meeting that level, and Rambus does have some uses, in particular, those that require a very fine granularity. But (direct) Rambus simply does not provide a lower price system for any level of performance, either in today's technology or, predictably, in the next five years, with the single exception being memory systems that have to have very large bandwidth with very small memory. The technology is otherwise quite useless. But don't take my view, look at the server business, which has removed the memory from its future almost universally. The older version of Rambus had the same advantages and disadvantages as Direct Rambus, and it was adopted by the same market segment that will account for most shipments of DRDRAM, namely game consoles. Certainly the PC industry is not wholeheartedly supporting the technology. Rumors abound of Intel stalwarts defecting to AMD largely as a consequence of Intel's connection to Rambus. As far as a mainstream memory technology, Rambus is quite dead. Intel has now been forced to recognize this fact, and has ceased attempting to push it on the industry. In addition, the granularity advantage of Rambus has been largely eliminated by the reduction in marginal costs of adding pins to packages. As I posted before, IBM is working on an 8-way server in a MCM with 5000 pins. The chip has four separate 64-bit wide SDRAM type interfaces, all on the same package. At the very small memory end, Rambus competes with embedded DRAM, and SRAM. Because of the above mentioned reduction in the cost of package pins, industry is no longer going in the direction of increasing bandwidth per pin. Instead, higher performance is being obtained through increased pin counts. Rambus is simply on the wrong side of the technology trend, and isn't going to break into the PC market when memory granularity does become an issue. It is also true that bandwidths per pin will continue to increase. While the 800MHz Rambus design originally had a 8 to 1 advantage, in terms of bandwidth per signal pin, over PC-100, it now has only a 2 to 1 advantage over DDR-II. I know that Rambus longs say that DDR-II doesn't really exist, but this is silly. Nintendo got rid of Rambus by replacing the Rambus memory with a memory using a variation of the DDR-II specification. All the memory makers are now developing DDR memories, and they are using the test equipment purchased for the RDRAM fiasco to test DDR parts, but with easier manufacturing due to the larger timing and voltage margins. In that sense, Rambus' niche has been picked up by DDR. The Nintendo design loss was very very significant for Rambus. It happened in the same company that was the leader in the adoption of the earlier version of Rambus, and was therefore quite familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of the technology. If Rambus can't keep its best customer in the low granularity design area that is its natural play ground, how are they possibly going to pick up design wins in the areas where they are not the natural choice? The answer is clear, only with Intel forcing it on the box makers. But AMD is showing too much strength for Intel to take that kind of price hit. -- Carl