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

To: Don Green who wrote (41987)	5/10/2000 9:36:00 PM
From: jim kelley	Respond to of 93625

McComas again...<LOL>

To: Don Green who wrote (41987)	5/11/2000 12:28:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi all; Re the Intel motherboard recall, some Bilow commentary... For reference, here's the CNET version of the news: Intel's plan to fix its latest bug--which will involve swapping the motherboard and memory in affected computers--could cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars, according to analysts. That puts the MTH problem in roughly the same class as Intel's infamous 1994 Pentium "floating point bug," for which the company took a $475 million charge. Technically, the flaw exists in a chip designed by Intel. So why is Rambus to blame? Intel made the chip for computer makers that wanted to adopt Intel's latest chipset, designed to speak Rambus' language, without using the more expensive form of high-speed memory. "It's the curse of Rambus," said one source. ... "The Timna processor will use a new version of the MTH that will provide a great level of noise immunity," said Intel spokesman Michael Sullivan. In other words, the company will test, and retest, the Timna MTH before its release. news.cnet.com First of all, I don't think the problem is "in roughly the same class as Intel's infamous 1994 Pentium" bug. That bug was present in 100% of the chips shipped. If you had a chip, you had a defective chip, and had to return it. This problem is a lot more subtle, and if you do have a machine with the "bad" version of the MTH chip, you do not then know for sure that your machine is defective. Consequently, most people will have no real reason to return their motherboard. And why would you want to pry your motherboard out of your computer and send it off to Intel, anyway? That's a lot more trouble than taking a CPU chip out of a socket. So I doubt that Intel will have a massive recall problem, or that they should have a massive recall problem. It all gets back to this post I made just after Intel delayed the i820: I am sure that the vast majority of Dell's early production Rambus machines are running beautifully, under normal operating conditions. I, myself, would be willing to buy one of those "defective" RDRAM systems. I would be sure to operate it in a stable temperature environment. I might, for instance, let it warm up for five minutes before making it do anything. I would be very careful if I ever touched those RIMMs, to clean them carefully before putting them back. I would keep dust from getting in the machine. I'd love to have one, at the right price, but I'd also like to wait for an Athlon, which I believe will kick rear end. #reply-11363837 The labor costs to replace all those motherboards would be horrible, but I don't think that it is going to happen. Imagine what an MIS director at a reasonably sized company that has never bought AMD product is thinking right now. The bottom line is that I don't think it's reasonable to hope for a massive replacement of SDRAM systems with RDRAM systems, most people are simply going to be too lazy, and are satisfied with the machine they have. Why replace their machine if it doesn't crash, maybe it's one of the machines that's okay. On the other hand, I would be very inclined to stuff my machine with a Gig or two of SDRAM, and ship it in for an i820 RDRAM replacement. It would undoubtedly run faster, and I could sell the excess memory on Ebay. But most importantly, Rambus longs should take a very good look at what just happened, from an engineer's point of view. The problem with the MTH is some sort of signal to noise ratio thingy. The MTH chip has two interfaces, an SDRAM interface (using standard industry signalling levels) and a Rambus channel interface (using Rambus' RSL signal levels). Of those two, the SDRAM interface is old technology, we learned how to make those bullet proof a long, long time ago. So the noise problem is undoubtedly happening on the RSL bus. The RSL bus interconnects the i820 to the MTH. And it very likely has a signal integrity issue in the MTH design. In the long run, this is not a good thing for Rambus. It basically shows that Intel had trouble making an interchip connection using Rambus' RSL technique. Maybe that is why the new 256Mb RDRAM chips have so many more pins than the 256Mb DDR chips ( #reply-13593644 ). The extra pins are being used for power and ground, and that will tend to improve the noise margin budget. While it is undoubtedly a good thing in the short run for RDRAM use, but it is also likely to put engineers further off their feed as far as using Rambus type signalling to interconnect between chips (if it is even possible to turn design engineers further off than they already are.) But there is no question that this fiasco is a continuation of the "curse of Rambus". This is the best reason in ages for business customers to switch over to AMD. -- Carl