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Politics : RAMTRONIAN's Cache Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NightOwl who wrote (7509)	7/24/2000 1:53:45 AM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14464

The trading hour is fast approaching so I am going to roost. But before I do I wanted to throw out a couple of questions that may or may not have large implications: The tone of old Doc Jacob's paper suggests that the folks at DARPA and U Michigan/Maryland believe that one standard for a low latency DDR2 is much better than two standards. Both VC DRAM and ESDRAM got approval, as standards or superset standards in the SDRAM and DDR-I, iteration. I have to assume that in view of JEDEC's requesting this study of the comparative performance of the NEC and EMS designs, the powers that be inside that .org must also feel the same way. So the question is, whether or not this study by Doc Jacob is enough to sway the real techies at JEDEC to vote in favor of EMS? Or has RMBS so poisoned the atmosphere that the big mem makers would be loath to give any small IP house an exclusive toehold in a major RAM industry standard? I figure we have Infineon's vote for obvious reasons. If Cypress and HP have votes I assume we'll get their's as well. These are major design wins for the EMS technology and I haven't heard of any similar arrangements for VC DRAM. The only significant problem that the study turned up for DDR2ES-Lite was its die penalty of 1.4%. But even in that area it came off better than DDR2VC which showed a 3-6% penalty depending on the cache design. I'm going to assume that RMTR will get the standard, but then the question will be who besides Infineon will be willing to pay the EMS royalty at any level? NEC may be willing to cross license their VC DRAM IP rights to the other fabs. Would that offset the advantage that DDR2ES has in die size and thus yield/costs? No doubt the bottom line on what this will mean to our bottom line is demand versus costs. Will the CPU, bus, UMA demands on main memory even require the added kick which DDR2 will bring to the table, let alone DDR2ES? In this regard we would be much better off if INTC/Samsung/Toshiba's support for DRDRAM could drag on for at least another two years. Without that mythical threat laying in the weeds, I just don't know if processor speeds alone, will warrant moving past DDR-I. But DRDRAM's costs are so high I just don't know if it can survive as the niche product it is. 0\|0

To: NightOwl who wrote (7509)	7/31/2000 9:01:32 PM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14464

Apparently no one believes are impartial DARPA selected Professors: Message 14140791 To: Gene Parrott who wrote (48536) From: NightOwl Monday, Jul 31, 2000 8:56 PM ET Reply # of 48561 I really don't understand: <...pregnant pause...> 1. Where does this notion of DRDRAM being able to compete in the com/graphics market come from? Carl has shown that DDR at 133MHz is already the flavor of choice for graphics cards. DDR chips already have a sustained bandwidth of at least the 2.1Gb/s that this 1066MHz DRDRAM chip will have and at much less power to boot. 2. DDR at 266Mhz will be faster still and 200MHz DDR2 will give a minimum bandwidth of 3.2Gb/s. 3. Since DRDRAM will never get the sweet meats in the PC sector, the economies of scale in this commodity business will always require it to be priced at a relative premium. How long can INTC and RMBS continue to carry this cost? I just don't get it. Where's the cost benefit analysis that suggests this design will win any market segment? 0\|0