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

To: Estephen who wrote (38414)	3/20/2000 2:10:00 PM
From: John Farrell	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 93625

Actually, I think it's extremely UNLIKELY that Rambus will be used by NVDA and MSFT for X-Box. While Rambus' first wins were in video cards, the companies that used Rambus (Cirrus Logic and Chormatic Research) were failures with the technology largely because Rambus couldn't provide the type of price/performance that the extremely cutthroat PC graphics world demanded. Nvidia is and has been using DDR SDRAMs with GeForce since it's introduction with shipping DDR based products through Creative Labs (retail) and HP and Dell (OEM). In the performance 3D accelerator game, memory bandwidth and latency are some of the largest concerns for the designing of successful products. The ASIC designers at all of the graphics companies look at every type of memory architectures and are keenly aware of the benefits/shortcomings of each type of memory. Since the 64 Meg of memory is going to be shared between the CPU and the graphics engine on the X-Box, this points more towards it being DDR memory as it's what is already used by NVDA. They need to get prototype parts as quickly as possible in order to be shipping the product for Christmas 2001 as the game developers need platforms quite a long time before the product ships. While it's possible that NVDA has had designers working on a completely memory architecture for quite a while, unless you see Rambus support in their upcoming NV15 chip (due in a few months), I'd say there'd be no way Rambus would be in X-box. -John