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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Herring who wrote (96606)	3/3/2000 4:13:00 PM
From: Gopher Broke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574493

Herring, <Anybody know if there will be something to equalize this (Rambus)?> Sure - an Athlon with Rambus. Intel does not have an exclusive license. AMD has the luxury of waiting and seeing.

To: Herring who wrote (96606)	3/3/2000 6:34:00 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574493

Unless I misunderstand the biggest challenge for AMD right now other than coming out with the 1G chip would be the Rambus memory. Anybody know if there will be something to equalize this? I think Rambus has been nothing but headache for Intel. Not as much the fact that Intel went with Rambus, but the fact that they went exclusively with Rambus, with no back up. This magnified the missteps of the chipset division into much larger proportions. Paradoxically, the performance increase that Rambus offers is in increased bandwidth, which mainly benefits servers, or maybe graphics memory. But because of all the bugs and strategic errors, Rambus is non-existant in servers, and it is being pushed to workstations and high end servers, where all the advantages evaporate. You need lower latency in workstations and desktops and Rambus in fact performs at best the same or worse in this category than SDRAM. So if you start with this can of worms that Rambus is, and add the fact that it is not competitive price-wise, there is no point for AMD to lose any sleep over it. At this time, I don't believe Rambus is anywhere on AMDs roadmap. Joe

To: Herring who wrote (96606)	3/3/2000 8:44:00 PM
From: Petz	Respond to of 1574493

Herring, re:<RAMBUS memory a challenge for AMD?> The fact that Intel is continuing to hype RAMBUS is an opportunity, not a challenge, for AMD. Take a look at tomshardware.com, and the following pages which attempt to determine the best platform for 133 MHz bus PIII's. The following benchmarks comparisons are between the VIA Apollo PRO 133A using cheap PC133 memory and and Intel i820 platform using 800 MHz expensive RAMBUS: Sysmark 2000 Win98SE: tie Quake 3: RAMBUS wins by 2% Quake 2: RAMBUS wins by 1% Unreal Tournament: RAMBUS wins by 2% Expendable: RAMBUS wins by 2% SPECviewperf (WIN98): RAMBUS wins by average of 10% However, when we look at SPECviewperf under Windows NT at anandtech.com, we find the following: SPECviewperf (NT 4.0): PC-133(VIA) wins 4/5 tests by average of 3% RAMBUS wins 1 of 5 tests by 12% ATHLON/PC-133 beats both Intel platforms by average of 6% in all five tests (2% to 10%) The fact is, between these two reviews that compared PC-133 platforms (not even DDR, just plain old PC-133) with 800 MHz RAMBUS platforms, there is absolutely no reason anyone would buy the RAMBUS. In the only application that seemed to show some RAMBUS benefit, the benefit disappeared and was reversed when Windows NT was used. I repeat, Intel's blind hyping of RAMBUS technology has only just begun to bite them. Petz