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

To: Victor Lazlo who wrote (36083)	12/30/1999 12:14:00 AM
From: Don Green	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

One Investment Company's Opinion of Rambus Grillo Enterprises (Not sure when it was written) Rambus (NASD: RMBS) A Single-Mindedness for Memory Talk about sticking with a vision. Rambus (NASD: RMBS) has been working for eight years to deliver on its original game plan--to develop the next generation of PC main memory. Along the way, the company took a few detours to prove that its technology worked and could be manufactured in quantities as high as millions of units. No problem. Rambus technology has been adopted by several graphics workstation manufacturers as well as the best-selling video game player Nintendo 64. And Intel (NASD: INTC) plans to support Rambus technology in chip sets for high-end PCs due out next year. By 2001 Rambus memory will be used in 46 percent of all PCs, and by 2002 in 57 percent, according to the market research firm In-Stat of Scottsdale, Arizona. What makes Rambus memory better? As microprocessor speeds escalate to 500 MHz and beyond, the rest of the memory subsystem has not kept up, effectively muzzling total system performance. Rambus memory can transfer data at 600 to 800 MHz--a huge leap past the current 100-MHz speed of SDRAM. Rambus offers a faster memory controller chip with fewer wires. Adding wires increases the amount of data you can transfer, but it also adds cost. "If you can transfer more per wire, you're going to have the most performance," says Rambus CEO Geoff Tate. The Future of Random Access Memory (RAM) What's more, the Rambus design offers plenty of headroom. "We provide a path for a lot more than a one-shot fix to the bandwidth problem," says Tate. "If Intel used the same number of pins on the controller chip that it now assigns to its SDRAM bus, it could have two Rambus connections and a sixfold increase in performance." The company plans to offer the third generation of memory for PCs through a variety of DRAM manufacturers that have licensed the technology. Tate says the cost of its RDRAM will be only "a little bit more" expensive for manufacturers to achieve a big performance boost. "We get high performance not through high-cost approaches," he says, "but by squeezing a lot more performance from technology that already exists." Rambus licenses its designs to manufacturers so it can focus on marketing and design without running a billion-dollar fab. Without the distraction of manufacturing, Tate says, his engineers can focus on where the market is going rather than where it is. And just where is that? Rambus expects to help power a new generation of PCs with such features as ultrarealistic multimedia, voice recognition, and 3-D interfaces. And not just on the high end. "If you want to build a sub-$1,000 PC with 128MB of RAM," Tate says, "you'll be able to do it with a single DRAM, instead of the eight you need today with SDRAM." SDRAM is considered state-of-the-art memory today, but Tate contends the technology is "running out of steam" when it comes to newer applications that will provide Jurassic Park like graphics realism. "To do those kinds of graphics requires hundreds of times more processor performance and commensurate increases in memory performance," he says. While other companies are working on new approaches to improving memory performance, Rambus claims the lead, with its Intel relationship and announcements from Compaq (NYSE: CPQ)and Dell (NASD: DELL)that they will ship machines with RDRAM technology next year. Sticking to the game plan, it seems, has proved a winning strategy. In addition, in what may become one of the most significant design wins for Rambus aside from Intel, Sony announced the use of Rambus technology in its next-generation PlayStation II video game system scheduled to debut in Japan this winter and in the U.S. and Europe in autumn of 2000. Additional licensees of Rambus technology announced during the quarter included Winbond, as the fifteenth RDRAM licensee; Acer Labs, for PC chipsets; Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HWP); National Semiconductor (NYSE: NSM), for integrated processors developed by its Cyrix subsidiary; and SwitchCore, for next-generation network switch products. Also, two major Taiwan foundries-TSMC and UMC-announced foundry services for Rambus chip customers. Bottom line Unlike many other "growth" stocks, where investors may not have to wait for a long period of time to realize the standardization, the outlook for Rambus to become the next memory interface standard continues to be very bright. grillo1.com