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

To: NightOwl who wrote (48681)	8/2/2000 1:53:57 AM
From: Brian1970	Respond to of 93625

Revisionist history? You have walked off the broken diving board right into the deep end, and there's no water in the pool. Don't worry, I'll be here when you climb out.

To: NightOwl who wrote (48681)	8/2/2000 2:51:33 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 93625

Hi NightOwl; From Infineon's website: DDR insulted! Infineon refers to DDR SGRAM as a "silly product type"!!! Silly Product Type; infineon.com Above link may quit working if Infineon changes its mind. Until then, look at the bottom left corner of the frame. But about the history of high bandwidth DRAM... While most designs get by with the milder stuff, there is always a market for high speed DRAM. The memory makers have been sampling DDR for 3 or 4 years, but designers avoided it because it looked like Intel would be able to force RDRAM onto the industry, and therefore DDR into nichedom. In fact, VIA has had a DDR compatible chipset since at least September 1997: viatech.com Now of course, there wasn't much performance advantage to be had by converting a memory over to DDR back in '97, but it would have had some advantage even with the low speed processors of that day (especially compared to PC66, for instance). But DDR would have taken off then except that it always had the Intel/Rambus deal hanging over its head. The worst damage Intel/Rambus did to industry was probably to the graphics guys. As I've stated many times here, it is a truism of graphics that the bandwidth be (at least) approximately proportional to the memory size. That market is a natural one for Rambus, but the (direct) RDRAM chips are so awful that the graphics houses uniformly avoided the stuff. (Note to jim kelley: The RDRAM on the Sony Playstation is a combined memory for a general purpose processor which happens to be typically programmed for games, not graphics memory for a graphics system.) The graphics guys were starved for bandwidth, but after Rambus went from Concurrent to Direct, they had the sad choice of either using a horrible memory technology (RDRAM was and is expensive, and hard to use), or using SDRAM. When they finally couldn't take it anymore, they and the memory makers put together the high bandwidth wide (i.e. x16 and wider) DDR SDRAM or SGRAMs that are now all the rage. But there is no doubt in my mind that the memory makers and graphics houses would have shipped DDR about a year or two before they did, if Intel/Rambus hadn't of been around to threaten DDR technology with an early grave. Along this line, I've heard rumors of Intel going around actually threatening graphics houses with darnation if they didn't support RDRAM, but I don't think that's the case. -- Carl