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

To: Bilow who wrote (40309)	4/19/2000 6:17:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi all; DDR Design wins of March and April 2000: Celestica ships DDR memory modules techweb.com Nanya eyes top-10 supplier spot Taiwan-based Nanya Technology Corp. will start sampling a double-data-rate 256-Mbit SDRAM chip in the third quarter and a 128-Mbit DDR in the fourth quarter as it attempts to become a major memory-chip supplier. ... The company is looking to expand to embedded DRAMs as well as Direct Rambus, although it's not engaged in licensing discussions for the latter. "We're waiting to see how Direct Rambus does in the market before making any decisions," Hurley said. techweb.com In other words, DDR is known to be a technology that will be important 2 years from now. RDRAM is still an unknown, at least to the memory industry. They expect DDR to take the market, but are hedging their bets by doing some preparation for RDRAM. They are hedging their bets, but the bulk of their efforts are going towards preparing for the move to DDR, not RDRAM. This thread being a fantasy thread, there has been speculation that Microsoft's X-Box will use RDRAM instead of DDR, as has been widely reported in the press. New design wins are going to DDR, not RDRAM. Here's a direct quote from Nvidia: "We have no stated plans to use Direct Rambus DRAM yet," said Nvidia's Vivoli. "In all of the research we did leading up to our soon-to-be announced parts we determined that we can get as much or more bandwidth out of high-speed DDR." (And DDR is cheaper) techweb.com And of course we all know of the recent very big news from Via, viatech.com . What hasn't been mentioned is that Via now includes a (rather droll) link to dramreview's technology usage page, calling it "unbiased." -- Carl

To: Bilow who wrote (40309)	4/19/2000 7:00:00 AM
From: John Walliker	Respond to of 93625

Carl, Power consumption calculations are complicated, and depending on how the system is designed, either Rambus or DDR could have the lower power consumption. Basically, RDRAM typically has the advantage in smaller memory systems, while DDR has the advantage in larger memory systems. But the simple notion that RDRAM uses less power is silly. RDRAM is well known in the industry to be a finger burner, that is why so much effort is put into the above Intel articles. Ah, finally we are close to agreement. The Rambus interface will use less power than a fully terminated DDR interface, particularly at high speeds. All things being equal, there should not be very much difference in the core power consumption of the two types running at equal speeds. However, the higher bus utilisation of Rambus will allow the core to be active for more of the time, so care needs to be taken in such comparisons. Rambus can concentrate heat dissipation in one chip in circumstances where DDR would spread it out more. Any memory operating at very high speed will get much hotter than has hitherto been the case. John