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

To: jim kelley who wrote (48565)	7/31/2000 9:56:37 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 93625

Hi jim kelley; The Sony playstation is an old, (and well known) design win. What RDRAM needs is new design wins, and that is precisely what they are missing. I'll believe that QRSL is going to ship with a significant commercial product when it does so (and playstation II would be a significant commercial product). Who knows, maybe I'll be surprised. But right now it sure looks like RDRAM is going to spend the rest of its years in nichedom. As for MAJC, didn't you notice that something that was supposed to happen in 2Q00 didn't happen? Why don't you find me a spec sheet on the MAJC, I'd like to order a few samples. (BWAHAHAHAHA!!!) Meanwhile, take a look at how fast DDR is increasing frequencies. The stuff started at 200/266MHz bit rates, is currently shipping 333, and sampling 400MHz, after being available as a mass produced product for well under a year. 800MHz is on the map for just two years from now. That's a 200% improvement, in the fastest bin, in only two years. Meanwhile, RDRAM is older as a commercial product, but will only have had one 33% improvement, but not until next year, and that one won't work in RIMMs, but is instead restricted to P2P. The technology is scheduled to have only one more improvement over the next two years. (See the Samsung paper on RDRAM from a week ago). Now tell me again. Which technology is the one that scales into the future? -- Carl

To: jim kelley who wrote (48565)	7/31/2000 10:33:38 PM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 93625

That's one way of looking at it. But I see Sony's decision to go with DRDRAM in the face of DDR's capability and cost advantage as based on two factors: 1. The willingness of RMBS/INTC to fund development costs to date through cash payments and equity distributions rather than passing those costs through the market chain; and 2. Sony's institutional memory of the VHS/Beta Max war which they lost some time ago. As I recall they went with the better technology there and got trounced because the "best technology" wasn't the generally accepted industry standard. At the time of the design win for PS2, INTC was talking and acting as though DRDRAM would be the next industry standard. Sony took that bate and now INTC appears to be switching. If INTC's reconsideration of first PC133 and then DDR had been made, open and above board, back in 1998 instead of in July, 2000, I doubt seriously that Sony would be pushing a DRDRAM based com server or anything else today. ...But on the bright side, these events are pressuring the development of DDR2. So I won't complain too loudly. But another thing I don't understand is INTC's switch on the previous DRDRAM only future. With memory bandwidth expanding at the current rate, as I understand it won't be long before a 256 bit wide FSB of the CPU is unable to handle a full speed exchange between the CPU core and memory. INTC must be considering a method of addressing this future bottleneck. If they are planing to attack the problem by making the bus wider, then I suppose DDR type memory makes sense. But if they could find a way to employ the RMBS bus IP for the FSB itself, wouldn't they be doing that now? I mean they are the ones who said back in 1997 that DRDRAM was needed to keep up with the then future speeds of the CPU clock. Wouldn't you think that a simple "elegant" solution to their and DRDRAM's problems would have been to build the CPU's FSB to the narrower, "streaming friendly", and "high speed" RMBS specs? They've been dealing with RMBS since at least '95. But I still haven't heard an announcement of a Rambus interface for the CPU in any subsequent product or product announcement. Doesn't this strike you as a little peculiar? 0\|0