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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles R who wrote (111674)	5/20/2000 4:55:00 PM
From: Mani1	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1572328

Why is it that Intel is sticking with RDRAM? There is got to be something that we are missing! SOMETING! Possible arguments are: 1. Intel is stupid. I just don't buy it. Intel has been a lean, mean cash machine for quarter after quarter. They have made some mistakes form time to time, but considering their size and stock appreciation they have been able to attract pretty good management talent (I am not sure I can say the same thing about engineering talent). So the thought of them doing this because they are stupid just doesn't make sense to me. 2. Because they are financially invested in RMBS. Again makes no sense. Intel market cap is over $400 billion. Their annual profit is $10 billion. Intel is way too big to benefit materially in a long run from their equity in RMBS. 3. RDRAM is indeed very advantages to SDRAM and over the long term should only have a slight price premium. If that is what they thought, how could they have been so wrong? They should have known that even if yields are high on RDRAM, a 30% bigger die as well as the royalties to Rambus is a substantial price penalty. Also I find it odd that their estimates of DRAM performance advantage has not materialized in the real world. 3. Intel wants to make a proprietary standard to shut out all competitors. Anyone can get a Rambus license, AMD already has it. Could be that Intel thinks that there is such a significant technical challenge to develop RDRAM chipset and mother boards that its competitors will not be able to do it? Maybe. Maybe they indeed thought that if they could convert all the DRAM makers to make only RDRAM and AMD or any other competitor could not develop a RDRAM platform, then INTEL would be the only one standing. Could it be?????? It is far fetched but it is better than anything I can think of. All and all, Intel has made a real fool of itself over this RDRAM fiasco. All the DRAM makers just told Intel to shove it and now Intel is left trying to bring up a whole new CPU with a likelihood of not having adequate amount of memory. This is at a time when Intel desperately needs a smooth launch of Willamette to fend off AMD. Stay tuned! (Hello DRBES :) Mani