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

To: sylvester80 who wrote (54269)	9/20/2000 1:47:22 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi sylvester80; Re: "Some brand-name OEMs will show demonstration systems at Comdex this fall, but they'll take the customary four to five months to test and qualify DDR chipsets for production systems. That means commercial PC OEMs will make their big DDR launch in mid-2001." This is undoubtedly accurate. But that does not mean that DDR systems will be unavailable for Christmas, just that you won't be able to buy them from "brand-name OEMs". The sad fact about RDRAM is that the high bandwidth isn't really needed in PCs except for multiprocessors. That is why RDRAM has failed in the PC marketplace so far. That is the problem that DDR now faces. The only reason that DDR will be able to win in the same markets that RDRAM failed at is because DDR will be a lot cheaper than RDRAM. Rambus hopes that RDRAM will come alive when the P4 hits, but we all know what kind of volumes are involved with the P4, and they are way too low to support cheap RDRAM. By contrast, DDR is made on the same production lines as SDRAM, and will drop in price at much lower production levels than RDRAM. Re: "He thought consumer-PC OEMs might miss the spring 2001 introduction for the back-to-school market and would make their big DDR push for the 2001 holiday selling season." The thing to note in the above sentence is "back-to-school" and "consumer-PC". These are two markets that RDRAM is quite excluded from. DDR will be first sold into high end game players' platforms, as those are the guys who are willing to go all out for a hot machine. Those sales will occur this year. When DDR hits the brand-name OEMs around mid 2001, it will be sold in workstations, and again in game platforms. By the end of 2001, DDR will even make it into consumer-PCs. You are making a big deal out of the fact that the PC marketplace is fragmented into several different areas. Of course DDR will be accepted first in the submarkets that are most appreciative of performance. You are quoting estimates for DDR penetration into the lowest performance segments, and using that to misestimate DDR's rollout. The gamesters are going to be all over DDR machines for Christmas 2000. The fact is that RDRAM is now shipping in something like 1% of PCs, and it has been out for a year. By the time DDR has been out for a year, it will have a much higher percentage of PCs. -- Carl