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

To: Bilow who wrote (44293)	6/14/2000 8:48:00 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 93625

Hi all; Rambus Implementers Forum passes away unheralded... One of the surefire indications of the death of RDRAM was the passing away of the Rambus Implementers Forum. To explain this, some history is needed. Rambus engineers were insufficiently experienced in practical memory design to understand the expensive consequences of one of their design bloopers. To quote the CEO, "If we knew then what we know now about the die size impact, we would have decided on fewer banks." The reason they didn't know about the die size impact was because they didn't know what they were doing. These ivory tower types always make mistakes like this, they just don't have the practical experience required to run around telling everybody else how to do these things. If a memory maker had come up with the Rambus architecture, they would have made a trial layout, realized that they had a problem, and solved it. Rambus, instead, sat in their ivory tower and directed the memory industry to do something stupid. This was not the only mistake Rambus made, RDRAM is shot through with badly thought out technical innovation. Anyway, after it became clear that RDRAM was going to have a severe die size penalty, but while it was still thought that RDRAM had a chance of survival, Rambus organized a committee to fix the die size problem: Moves to pare Rambus costs while prepping chip set for SDRAMs ...the cost of manufacturing, packaging and testing Rambus DRAMs is too high for most of the cost-sensitive PC industry. To that end, Intel and Rambus Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) announced the formation of the Rambus Implementers Forum, a committee of DRAM makers charged with finding ways to reduce costs. Among their biggest tasks will be deciding how to cut the number of memory banks on each RDRAM from the current two sets of 16 dependent banks, a source of die-size bloat. ... Geoff Tate, Rambus chief executive officer, said Rambus and RDRAM vendors realize that having so many on-chip memory banks made it more difficult to efficiently lay out the redundancy bits needed for respectable yields. Adding redundancy bits for each bank increased die size, hiking costs. Cutting redundancy bits can also raise costs by reducing yields. "If we knew then what we know now about the die size impact, we would have decided on fewer banks. [Doh!] But the issue is not just reducing the number of banks, it is making sure there is compatibility among the various DRAM vendors," he said. Tate said he expects a memory-bank decision within months. As vendors create new mask sets for shrink versions of the various 128-Mbit RDRAM implementations, the reduced-bank design would be implemented. techweb.com Rambus PR re this: An RDRAM Implementers Forum Web site will be constructed in the near future and will have membership details. intel.com That was back in September of last year. Now nine months have gone by, and still no baby. No RDRAM Implementers Forum Web site. Want to know why? Rambus was aborted back in late '99. The Rambus Implementrs Forum shuffled off this mortal coil along with the rest of RDRAM technology, probably in the back of a dirty alley. The official announcement of the death of the RDRAM Implementers Forum was also the time at which it was announced that the new ADT alliance would develop the next PC main-memory architecture, and Rambus wasn't invited: Rambus insists DRAM alliance needs its participation Rambus Inc. has thrown down the gauntlet to the Advanced DRAM Technology (ADT) alliance, claiming that the group's efforts to develop a new PC main-memory architecture will not succeed without Rambus' input. Created earlier this year at the urging of Intel Corp., the alliance hopes to field a low-cost PC main memory for the 2003 market (see Dec. 22, 1999 story). While a number of leading DRAM vendors were asked to join the committee, Rambus, whose Direct Rambus DRAM architecture is now making its way into high-end PCs, did not receive an invitation. ... Additionally, Kanadjian disclosed for the first time that an initiative to design a more austere and potentially cheaper Direct Rambus chip has been scrapped. Intel and Rambus last fall had formed an industry RDRAM implementers' forum to consider reducing the number of memory banks in the chip from the current 32 banks to 8 or 16. semibiznews.com Let's all remember exactly how new memory technologies are made: (1) Decide on a new architecture. (But make sure that the bozos from Rambus aren't around to screw it up.) (2) Get the memory makers to agree to eventually manufacture it. (3) Get the chipset makers to agree to manufacture chipsets that will use the memory. (4) Get the motherboard makers to agree to make motherboards that will use the chipset. (5) Get the box makers to agree to use the motherboards to make computers. (6) Start the whole group off at a running start, and Pray that the consumers will buy it. You only have to screw up one of the above six steps to screw up the whole thing. With the RDRAM memory technology, Rambus blew step 1 due to their incompetence. The memory makers screamed and hollered, and were finally bribed by Intel into pretending to sign on to step 2. Step 3 was a disaster as well, with only Intel agreeing to make PC chipsets, and then they failed to deliver them on time. Having seen the above, it is pretty obvious why Rambus got dropped off the back of the boat. The company is a spherical fiasco - a fiasco from all possible angles. -- Carl