Intel's Barrett calls Rambus alliance a mistake; Intel now looking at DDR
By Mark Hachman
TechWeb News
(10/18/00, 06:51:29 PM EDT)
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Intel Corp. chief executive Craig Barrett now calls his company's relationship with Rambus Inc. "a mistake," according to a report published today.
The remarks back up comments Intel executives made Tuesday ina conference call with analysts announcing the company's third-quarter results.
Intel executives said they were looking "very seriously" at using rival double-data-rate memory with its desktop PC chipsets, a statement that by itself put Intel's relationship with Rambus in even greater doubt.
Barrett went a step further today, in an article published by the Financial Times of London. "We made a big bet on Rambus and it did not work out," Barrett admitted. "In retrospect, it was a mistake to be dependent on a third party for a technology that gates your performance."
In the article, Barrett also said Intel was hoping to partner with a company that was a technology innovator, rather than "seeking to collect a toll from other companies."
A spokeswoman for Rambus, Mountain View, Calif., did not respond to calls asking for comment.
The British paper said Barrett was referring to Rambus' practice of suing other memory chip firms.
In its suits, which have included Hitachi Ltd. and Micron Technology Inc. Rambus has asserted that it holds fundamental patents that apply not only to its memory technology, but the broader synchronous memory market as well.
A spokesman for Intel, Santa Clara, Calif., said he believed the quotes to be accurate and representative of a viewpoint Barrett has held for about six months.
Analysts who had noted Intel's gradual steps away from Rambus were nevertheless shocked.
"I wondered if this would ever happen, and whether Intel would do it publicly," said analyst Bert McComas.
Barrett's statements, however, back up comments made by Intel executives during the conference call. They shifted their stance on double-data-rate (DDR) memory, seen as a competitor to the Direct Rambus technology.
"As we have said before, we are adopting DDR technology for servers, and exploring DDR on desktop," said Paul Otellini, vice president of the Intel Architecture Group in Santa Clara.
To a follow-up question from an analyst, Otellini added, "We're looking very, very seriously at it."
While the statement doesn't set Intel's plans in stone, it's also a further indication that Intel may be straying further away from Rambus.
Intel failed to include a session on its future memory strategy at the Intel Developer Forum in August, leaving the company's chipset and memory policy the topic of rumors, product roadmaps, and back-room discussions.
Otellini's comments also potentially confirm a two-week-old report by Electronic Buyers' News. Several major DRAM producers and module makers have told EBN that they are shipping unbuffered DIMMs to Intel in large enough quantities to validate a DDR chipset.
A DDR chipset for servers, which the company has openly said it is developing, would use buffered DIMMs.
In February, however, Intel executives at the Spring IDF tied the forthcoming Pentium 4 to the Direct Rambus memory architecture, claiming Intel's high-speed Pentium 4 would demand an equally high-performance memory architecture.
Over time, Intel backed away, responding to what analysts said were concerns over the high cost of Direct Rambus chips.
The disclosure would not necessarily tie DDR to the Pentium 4, either. Sources have named the Almador, a chipset designed primarily for the Pentium III, and the Brookdale, a similar mass-market PC chipset for the Pentium 4, as possible suspects.
SDRAM is considered a cheaper alternative to Direct Rambus memory, though it offers lower bandwidth. DDR DRAM is seen as an evolutionary means to achieve performance parity with Direct Rambus, while keeping costs down.
Memory vendors such as giant Micron, Boise, Idaho, distinctly favor DDR. In their earnings report, Micron executives showed slides characterizing Rambus as a tiny sliver of overall DRAM production during the next year or so. |
