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

To: Dave B who wrote (45030)	6/19/2000 11:56:00 AM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

A couple of thoughts for all those crying "it's no fair, Rambus is holding the memory industry hostage" and complaining about cross-licensing (and apologies if these points have already been made)... 1) Rambus is not about memory, it's about high-speed chip-to-chip communications. The memory market just happens to be the first market on which they've focused. But it's just a segment of their total market, not their be-all-and-end-all. And by not only developing the communications technologies but by providing programs for ensuring interoperability, they bring significant value to the semiconductor market as a whole. 2) It was pointed out in one of the articles posted when the Hitachi lawsuit was filed that the Japanese have screwed up by focusing their efforts on individual chip technologies, not the "system-level" technologies. This is where Rambus has focused their energies, and there's no reason they should have to give away their ideas for free. 3) As for cross-licensing, what do the memory manufacturers have that Rambus would want (since the don't build physical products)? If something ever comes up, I'll bet that Rambus will cut a deal to get whatever they need. JM2C, Dave

To: Dave B who wrote (45030)	6/19/2000 11:37:00 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Carl, To get to a 4x, Rambus is likely going to double the bus width to 32/36 bits ... and also double the frequency to 1600MHz. They've already announced (last January/February?) that that's exactly how they're going to do it. Aren't you keeping up? Actually, it appears I was wrong. Someone else pointed out that they'll use the quad-data-rate technology so they're not doubling the frequency. Dave

To: Dave B who wrote (45030)	6/22/2000 2:26:00 AM
From: vvga	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Carl, Sure, Rambus will announce a 4x RDRAM this summer. After what happened to their previous technology, how can anyone expect that this new attempt will be warmly welcomed by the memory makers? I'm sure the networking guys will be interested in licensing the technology (see the QRSL announcements). I suspect that from a DRAM point of view, it won't be a factor for a while (and neither will DDR-II, DDR-III, DDR-IV, ad ridiculouseum). The overclockers are already running their 333MHz DDR chips at 400MHz and higher. 600MHz isn't that far away. By contrast, no one has reports of any overclockers stepping up the performance of PC800. Since there are no PC systems using DDR, I assume you're talking about soldered chips. As you yourself have pointed out, there's a big difference in the difficulty in implementing soldered vs. socketed configurations. Where's the DDR-I in PC systems? And how fast do you think the industry will want to move to DDR-IV after they have problems implementing DDR-I? NVidia has been using DDR for quite a while now in their GeForce products -- just like Toshiba/Sony using RDRAM in PS/2. It's not a leap of faith to get to chipsets.