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

To: Bilow who wrote (55552)	9/27/2000 6:27:48 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Two RDRAM chips at about $25 each increases the retail price of the product by about $200. Do you have a source for this $25 number, please. Dave p.s. You're mixing metaphors, as it were. Scumbria was talking about a processor that cost $15 and RDRAM that cost $200. By your formula, that would make retail price over $800 just for the RDRAM.

To: Bilow who wrote (55552)	9/27/2000 6:37:47 PM
From: sylvester80	Respond to of 93625

Bilow, I see a on-chip Rambus memory controller on slide 7. Can you point to a link that says otherwise? Also on the issue of price between SDRAM and RDRAM. You are comparing apples and oranges. RDRAM may have a 50% premium right now but that drops to 20% in 2001 and 5-1% in 2002. Secondly, the equivalent comparison is not with SDRAM but with specialized DDR for graphics cards. And those prices are also way much higher than SDRAM prices. I wish Bilow that you would try for once not to cloud your messages in FUD (I know you had the FUD warning there but you left the price out of it especially for applications like graphics cards.) I doubt also the MAJC delay has anything to do with memory. They are also 2 years behind schedule on their UltraSparc V. New designs take time. I'm sure you know that. news.cnet.com Plus, DDR has run out of bandwidth in graphics cards. Nvidia's Memory Bandwidth Problem aceshardware.com The bottom line is: the current Nvidia GeForce-2 GTS can fully utilize up to 20GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The fastest current GeForce-2 you can buy is the ultra. It retails for $500, because it uses 4-4.5ns DDR memory. If you overclock the memory (and you will--that's the only reason you would pay $500 for this card), you can boost the memory to 500MHz (250MhzX DDR) and get 8GB/sec. of peak bandwidth. And the GeForce-2 clocked at 280Mhz will use all of that and still be starved for more. So, how fast would DDR have to be to satisfy the current generation of Nvidia chips, on a 128-bit bus? 20GB/s / 128-bit (16 bytes) = 1,250MHz, DDR. In other words, DDR needs to get FIVE TIMES FASTER than it is right now to match the GeForce-2 GTS. Or, you could do something like this: 128-bit / 16-bit = 8 : 8 x 3.2 = 25.6 GB/s for a 128-bit databus What memory does that? hardwarecentral.com

To: Bilow who wrote (55552)	9/27/2000 6:48:09 PM
From: mishedlo	Respond to of 93625

<<Two RDRAM chips at about $25 each increases the retail price of the product by about $200.>> But an extra 2 SDRAM chips at say 12.50 would increase the cost by $100. Sorry I do not think I buy this logic. They want to make a certain % profit I would think and if they pay an extra $50 and the percentage they want is say 20%, then I would think that the total cost would be $60 with RDRAM and for the sake of argument lets say DDR is half as expensive the cost for DDR with overhead would be $27.50. Now $60-$27.50 = $33. Just how relevant is this, assuming for the moment "ALERT FUD ATTACK that RDRAM has performance benefits- END ALERT"

To: Bilow who wrote (55552)	9/27/2000 7:48:45 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Carl, Scumbria's point about the $200 RDRAM is valid, even if his pricing is a bit obscure. There has to be quite a large markup between cost of goods sold and retail in order for a product to pay for all the other stuff. Typical ratios would be around 3 for fairly high volume products. For high end products, the ratios have to go much higher. That is why a $500 Nvidia based graphics card only has about $120 worth of components on it. Two RDRAM chips at about $25 each increases the retail price of the product by about $200. Okay, you guys haven't responded with any pricing links, so I finally realized what a load of BS you were presenting. You can buy an 8-chip RIMM for $219 retail (128MBs of PC600, which would be fine for low-cost systems). That means that each chip translates to $219/8 or $27.38 retail. And even that's really too high, since a RIMM also includes a little bit of PC board and the labor of assembly and testing. But using your formula, Carl, this means the cost to the manufacturer of each chip is $27.84/4 or $6.84, even closer to $2 than it is to $20 or $200. So using your formula, it would cost $6.84 to add 16M of RDRAM to a low-cost system, or $13.69 to add 32M. Actually, I'll bet it's even less than this. You guys aren't even close. Don't bother admitting your mistake -- I'm not expecting you to, and it might quell my disgust at your BS anyway. Dave