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Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: chaz who wrote (34416)	11/7/2000 2:20:49 AM
From: tinkershaw	Respond to of 54805

Third impression: This in no way looks like Intel backing away from Rambus. Despite the rhetoric, believing the rumors of Intel backing away from Rambus is like believing that Gore is for a smaller and leaner government. The rhetoric does not back the reality. Hmmm, Intel pressuring Kingston? Calling in the favors on RMBS' behalf. Gotta like that. Other potential news on the RMBS front. Discussion has started that DSPs, the type Texas Instruments is so good at, may provide an even larger revenue stream than DRAM in the future, and that Micron would be one of the primary suppliers of chips into this DSP market. The reason this is so lucrative for Rambus is not because of the amount of memory in these DSP products (relatively small) but each DSP requires a memory controller from which Rambus gets a 3-5% royalty. That could prove enormous and Micron knows this. This is still under the category of "theoretical discussion" at this point but since TI does license RDRAM it is certainly well within the realm of possibilities. So I still stress, that no matter what your feelings towards Rambus as a possible gorilla may be, that Rambus has enormous markets it can exploit that go well above and beyond the DRAM market. I think the really only debate left is not if RMBS can be a gorilla, or if RMBS can accumulate large amounts of revenues; clearly it can, and it can in the mulit-billions of $s. I think the big issue is for how long can it keep up its GAP - ie, what is the duration of its sustainable advantage? Unfortunately, other than stating that Rambus' patents are fundamental to the way mainstream high-speed memory works today, from SDRAM to DDR to RDRAM to DDR-II, I do not know what sort of high-speed memory may be developed in the future. It seems relatively safe to say that at least through 2004 or 2005 (2003 for the greatest of pessimists) there will be no readily available substitutes to challenge Rambus' hegemony over its markets. Beyond that I cannot say. Rambus is forward thinking however. They have already designed the next generation or two of high-speed memory. It remains to be seen if something revolutionary (not evolutionary as that would probably fall under RMBS patents) might come along to challenge Rambus technology. But again, any such challenge, if any, seems 3-5 years out minimum. Tinker Of course anyone with knowledge of such disruptive technologies in development would provide great value to the Rambus discussion