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

To: Bilow who wrote (40310)	4/19/2000 6:32:00 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 93625

RDRAM design wins starting to go stale... Sitera: Meanwhile, announced design wins for RDRAM are starting to stretch. That is, the actual design win was before last summer, but it is only now being made public. For example, the Sitera win is for silicon to be delivered this spring. The design had to have started well before the September Camino fiasco: Sitera is on schedule to receive three IQ2000 Prism family members from its foundry, United Microelectronics Corp., this spring: ... Sheafor said the decision to rely on Rambus for primary memory control happened early in the Prism design cycle, since alternatives like synchronous or DDR DRAM would require too much parallelism in memory. In any event, the entire Prism architecture is oriented around the use of dynamic, rather than static, RAM. techweb.com Note that the decision to use RDRAM was made "early in the design cycle", and therefore before it became clear that DDR was going to be cheaper, and more available. And don't give me flack about Sheafor's mention of higher parallelism with DDR. It didn't stop IBM from their plans to build an 8-way machine with 256-bit wide paths to DDR memory. Sitera chose Rambus early in the design cycle, as he admitted above. Now they have to live with it. What do you expect the poor guy to do, admit that they blew it? -- Carl

To: Bilow who wrote (40310)	4/19/2000 8:08:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Carl, re: x-box, the alleged pending switch to Rambus was a hot topic for the John Corse contingent on Usenet a while back. Personally, I think the most interesting thing about the x-box is its memory architecture, Nvidia was claiming 6 gigabyte bandwidth for its 256 bit wide DDR design, which turns the standard PC knock against low perf UMA graphics on its head. If Nvidia can produce that, I think they ought to go into the chipset business, that would give them a way to make much money with the technology in the 18 months before X-box launches. 18 months if you trust Microsoft's software schedule, that is. The Rambus logic seems to be that since Bill picked Intel for the processor (600 mhz, e.g. extremely minimal for 18 months from now), a switch to Rambus was inevitable. That would imply a complete rearchitecting of the X-box, which seems to be designed much more around the graphics chip than the processor. A paragraph above the one you quote from techweb.com : The choice of DDR memory for the X-Box is also significant. Console maker Nintendo appears to be preparing for a shift from Rambus memories used in its current Nintendo 64 console to DDR-II in its upcoming Dolphin system. Like the X-Box, Dolphin is also slated for a Christmas 2001 launch. The Playstation 2, by contrast, uses two channels of Direct Rambus. Well, this horse may not be dead yet, but a visit to the vet sure seems in order. I think I will take a be kind to animals pledge here and leave the local self-styled "BS detectors" to their own devices. It's a tough job, maintaining the BS in RMBS. Cheers, Dan.