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

To: Jim McMannis who wrote (39822)	4/13/2000 3:23:00 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Jim, And as we know there are applications on which RAMBUS looks very good. Scumbria mentioned these. Scumbria mentioned the ones he thought were good. He may or may not be right. I'm pleased to see the PIII/820/RDRAM doing such a great job on the benchmarks which test many different aspects of the systems. but don't you think there is a window of opportunity? Always. Price definitely needs to come down. But that's just the next step, not some insurmountable barrier. It'll happen (it already is happening). This is probably an even bigger issue for DDR, BTW. As RDRAM becomes more and more entrenched, the opportunity for DDR gets smaller and smaller. They better get something out soon and it better not have any technical problems if they expect to have any chance of success at all. the technology may well embrace the more practical and free-er standard of DDR. Yes, it might. But chances get slimmer every day. Probably servers represent the best shot, but it'll be a limited market. Even given the choice of equal performance over all, I would think the market would flow to the open, cheaper architecture. Agreed. So far there's no public, unbiased benchmarks of equal performance. It appears that you are banking on the idea that what Intel wants Intel gets. I do generally believe that is the case. I'm not in love with either Intel or AMD. I don't own either, though I've owned Intel in the past when I was in my Dell/Cisco/Intel phase. I believe that Intel can, if and when it desires, pretty much manage AMD to low profitability levels. Obviously AMD had a good quarter and has made progress in the high end with the Athlon, but if you don't believe that Intel probably has twice as many engineers as AMD has employees in their entire company focused on regaining their lead, then you have no understanding of Intel. They can apply soooo many more resources to the battle than AMD can ever hope to muster. Personally, I'm glad AMD exists. It helps keep Intel on their toes, from getting fat and happy. That's what keeps the technology moving forward. But don't think that AMD will somehow overtake Intel in this space. AMD should learn to pick it's battles better -- why fight against RDRAM? There are so many better places to focus its energies. OTOH, now that they're hiring RDRAM engineers, may be they've seen the light. Intels RAMBUS optimised chipsets (820) have been less than stellar. Back in the fall they had to dumpster a bunch of motherboards. Their current flagship Pentium III doesn't yield well enough at sufficient speeds to warrant adding expensive Rambus to high end systems. Well, I guess Intel should just fold up the tent and go out of business. What you're talking about is SOP. It happens. Mistakes happen. I judge individual not be whether or not they make mistakes, because everyone makes mistakes, but how they recover from them. Same for companies. Do the management teams mobilize to right the wrong? Do they address the customer's needs appropriately? Do they address the channels needs? We were frustrated last fall with the lack of public information on the delay, but the public wasn't the entity being hosed -- it was the memory manufacturers and the PC manufacturers. Dell, HP, IBM, etc. I have no clue how well Intel worked with everyone, but I do know that Dell, HP, and IBM are all advertising RDRAM-based systems, so they must have been placated somehow. And more memory manufacturers are ramping up and increasing their production of RDRAM chips. So they must have been placated. This is a great big game, and in any game someone misses a block, boots a grounder, or shifts gears at the wrong moment. It doesn't mean that you lose the race. Dave