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

To: pompsander who wrote (41045)	4/27/2000 12:57:00 PM
From: Dave B	Respond to of 93625

Pomp, Won't DDR have the same, or similar, ramping up problems as RDRAM had (has?). Man, you're going to get a lot of replies to that one! The advocates of DDR are going to claim that DDR is just a natural evolution of SDRAM and doesn't add anything to the basic cost or complexity of the die. Therefore the memory manufacturers like it because they get the same yields (approximately, I would guess) from a wafer as SDRAM. I don't know if you can use the same SDRAM testers or if you have to buy new testers. Likewise, since it's roughly based on the same SDRAM technology, they'll say that the designers and implementers will be able to adjust quickly to it and build it easily into systems. OTOH, the advocates of RDRAM are going to claim that it's not just a simple "drop into place" to design DDR into the same types of systems. Likewise, they'll claim that the design isn't as clean from a systems point of view and that DDR will be more unstable in systems. This is going to be a watch-and-wait issue. Dave p.s. Get ready to have your mailbox fill up <G>.

To: pompsander who wrote (41045)	4/27/2000 1:11:00 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi pompsander; Re "break in" problems possible with DDR. This subject is not one that mom and pop are going to be able to easily make a rational estimation of. They will instead have to rely on the words of the experts. Alternatively, they can wait until this summer and find out for sure. While this belief has been mentioned on this thread a lot, I don't believe that it is one that is prevalent in the industry trade press. With Rambus, on the contrary, there were many predictions of its difficulty in manufacturing well before the Camino problems came out. As an example, go back and read my posts of August and early September, 1999, in addition to my own predictions of difficulty, I gave links to numerous industry articles noting the manufacturing problems. Rambus has been pretty good at pointing out the shortcomings of competing technology, (while ignoring their own). Can anyone find a paper where Rambus stated that DDR was likely to have this sort of difficulty? If there is, I would like to look at it. Alternatively, some sort of statement out of the dramreview website would suffice. In the absence of real articles to the contrary, mom and pop should assume that suggestions of unreliability in DDR are just the dreams and guesses of the non experts, not the experts. The absence of serious articles suggesting that DDR will have these kinds of problems is the best indication, understandable by mom and pop, that this is not a problem, but there are a few other indications. IBM, well known to be picky about manufacturability, is strongly supporting DDR. So are all the other DRAM makers. The DRAM makers have repeatedly stated that DDR memory is easier to make than RDRAM. The independent chipset makers are going strong with DDR despite Intel's support for RDRAM. Nvidia has shipped plenty of graphics cards, and a bunch of new designs just got announced. Why should we suppose that so many industry participants are setting up a boondoggle? Of course, one might ask why Intel set itself up for the Camino fiasco. But just because Intel screwed up is no reason to believe that everybody else will. After Intel got the options on RMBS, there was a big reason for them to remain committed to the technology. Most of the rest of the industry was able to choose without such financial considerations in mind. -- Carl