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

To: Bilow who wrote (40366)	4/19/2000 5:41:00 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Carl, Okay, now we know your view of Semico versus dramreview, but who cares? The granddaddy of all of the research companies we've been discussing is Dataquest and here' what they have to say... (Jim Handy and George Iwanyc are senior analysts with Dataquest/Gartner Group, a market research firm based in San Jose.) ----------------- A Look at DRAMs in 2000 (Part 1). (Company Business and Marketing) Electronic News (1991), Jan 10, 2000 v46 i02 p8 By Jim Handy, George Iwanyc Full Text After a long delay, Intel Corp. has finally started to ship its 820 chipset, the enabler for the use of Rambus DRAMs (RDRAMs) in the PC. Dataquest expects for this event to have a significant impact on the DRAM market over the next year. Intel's 820 will drive the adoption of RDRAMs into the PC. Our forecast is based upon the assumption that Intel's ramp of the 820 chipset will be similar to the company's ramps of other chipsets before the 820. Intel has indicated that this is its plan. Some might differ with this assumption, using the current high prices of RDRAMs as evidence that such a ramp cannot be made to happen. Those of us with long memories, though, will recall that the price of every new DRAM has been high at the initial introduction of the Intel chipset that supports it, including the PC-100, 66MHz SDRAM, and even EDO. PC-133 has been viewed by some as the interface that will make Intel rethink its RDRAM plans. When Intel announced during the last Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in September that a 133MHz DRAM would be supported by future Intel chipsets, some pointed to this as a turning point in the company's previously unrelenting push toward Rambus. This appears not to be the case. 133MHz DRAMs are currently suffering from a significant price slide and it would have been ridiculous for Intel to have ignored the opportunity to scoop up some additional bandwidth for free. All those chipsets that Intel originally intended to ship using PC-100 are fine candidates for conversion to 133MHz. The only thing standing in the way is Intel's concern that systems using SDRAMs faster than 100MHz cannot be made to operate reliably with a wide array of DRAM module types plugged into the bus. The company now seems to have decided to stretch to meet this challenge. As a result, Dataquest expects to see 133MHz SDRAMs almost completely replace PC-100 parts over the course of the year. Why has Intel chosen to ignore 133MHz technology until now? We do not believe that this has been solely the result of technical difficulties. Intel has been worried about a lack of focus at the DRAM manufacturers. Intel believed that it needed to push single-mindedly towards RDRAMs as the only solution in order to make DRAM manufacturers finally accept this as a possible outcome. Had Intel been seen to waver in this respect, they would not have been able to make DRAM manufacturers put in the time, effort, and expense of implementing viable RDRAM solutions. It would have been more than easy for DRAM manufacturers to justify putting off an investment in RDRAMs at a time when they were already losing significant sums due to history's most protracted DRAM oversupply. There has been a lot of talk lately about double-data rate DRAMs, or DDR, and the possibility that this less-expensive technology could postpone the need for RDRAMs indefinitely. Dataquest does not buy into this theory for a number of reasons. First, the DDR interface, although easier to implement than RDRAMs (without the burdens of an increased die size and a royalty payment), is a solution only at the DRAM chip level. Many of the cookbook details that have been so neatly worked out by Rambus' engineers, details like signal paths, termination, and clocking, are left to the individual OEM in the case of DDR. This can significantly slow down time-to-market. Second, the high-signal frequencies used by DDR are alien to most circuit board designers and are likely to end up causing trouble when brought through one or more connectors to an indeterminate number of DRAM chips. Other reasons include a lack of the required support components and even a lack of rigid standardization that could impede the acceptance of this technology until the true winner is determined from an array of nearly compatible devices. Jim Handy and George Iwanyc are senior analysts with Dataquest/Gartner Group, a market research firm based in San Jose. --------------- Don't bother arguing with me -- send an e-mail to Dataquest if you disagree. But just remember the following about Dataquest: "Unlike dramreview, they are not just a single recent marketing employee of Rambus. If you want their full opinions, you will have to pay for them, they do not give it out for free. That is where their source of money is, they get it by being right often enough that people pay them money for their information (not their stock):" And they make a lot more money at it than Semico. And have a lot more clients who read these newsletters. Dave

To: Bilow who wrote (40366)	4/19/2000 5:46:00 PM
From: Dave B	Respond to of 93625

Carl, BTW, here's Part II of the Dataquest viewpoint... -------- A Look at DRAMs in 2000 (Part 2). (Industry Trend or Event) Electronic News (1991), Jan 17, 2000 v46 i03 p8 By Iwanyc, Jim Handy and George Full Text Dataquest does, in fact, show significant double-data rate (DDR) shipments in the near future. Why is that? We believe that DDR will be the technology of choice in some key applications, the main one being graphics accelerators. Graphics accelerators have two virtues that support the use of extremely fast SDRAMs as well as DDR point-to-point connections. When the DRAM is not socketed and when a predetermined number of chips is used (rather than a flexible number) the designer can optimize board layout to harness much higher speeds than can be supported in more flexible systems. These systems can take all that DDR or 200MHz SDRAM have to offer without exceptional concern about noise and loading. Some graphics subsystems already do harness the power of very high-speed SDRAMs -- some as fast as 180MHz. This is a good fit for these extremely fast SDRAMs and will be a good fit for DDR. Another application that is interested in DDR is servers. There are pluses and minuses to using DDR in this application. The minus is that the widespread use of modules adds a lot of uncertainty to the amount of loading on the address and data buses. This would indicate that the DDR parts used in flexible memory systems will need to be conservatively derated, perhaps not being able to harness all the speed that DDR has to offer. The plus is that the server, by nature of its being a large-memory machine, must have a large number of DRAM chips inside. The more chips inside the box, the more bandwidth can be achieved through such tried-and-true means as bus interleaving and bus widening. Large memory arrays have the option of supporting 1,024-bit wide bus loads from DRAM straight into a similar-sized cache line on an off-chip L2 or L3 cache. Try to do this with the nominal eight or nine DRAM chips in a typical PC's main memory! RDRAM was conceived to maximize bandwidth in low-chip count systems, and can actually add complexity to large memory systems. We anticipate seeing very large memory arrays continuing to be built with non-Rambus technologies. What about other systems? Assuming, then, that RDRAM will take a large slice of the PC market in 2001 and beyond and given that the PC market now consumes, and will continue to consume, between 75 percent and 80 percent of all DRAM sold, one has to conclude that RDRAM will become the focus of all DRAM manufacturers' cost-reduction efforts. This same phenomenon has happened in the past. At its inception, SDRAM had a larger die size, was more costly to test, and yielded worse than the equivalent EDO chips. Look at the market now. EDO DRAMs routinely sell at the same price as their SDRAM counterparts, and sometimes command a higher price, depending more on the availability of parts on the market than on the speed of the technology. Now, if the RDRAM receives all the attention of the designers in the die-shrink group, and if the RDRAM constitutes the bulk of the market, then it is inevitable that RDRAM pricing should eventually drop below SDRAM pricing. This will then have a self-propelling effect of forcing RDRAM to be used in applications that don't need all that bandwidth, but that need to use the cheapest DRAM available. This means that anything from hard disk drives right down to the lowly digital telephone answering machine are likely to be found using RDRAMs in future years. For 2000, though, we see a more gentle progression. RDRAMs will penetrate to reach 13 percent of the year's market over the course of the year, the bulk of this number shipping toward the end of the year. DDR will not achieve such a high number and we expect to see the difference in penetration between the two technologies increase rather than decrease. Although it is likely that DDR's acceptance in graphics subsystems will ramp faster than will RDRAM (from a perspective of the percent of all systems penetrated) we do not anticipate that overall DDR shipments will ever come near those of RDRAMs. Jim Handy and George Iwanyc are senior analysts with , a market research firm based in San Jose. The first part of this Viewpoint appeared in the Jan. 10 issue of Electronic News. ------------- Nothing else to add, Carl. The premier research firm has spoken. Dave