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

To: Knight who wrote (73111)	5/17/2001 10:50:33 AM
From: Knight	Respond to of 93625

Some more thoughts on FUD from the Gorilla Game board: Message 15810693

To: Knight who wrote (73111)	5/17/2001 11:01:42 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

1) RDRAM will eventually win out over DDR because it has superior characteristics which will become more apparent (and, hence, compelling) as CPU speeds increase. Let's debate this for the moment (I agree with your second point). Tell me why you see DRDRAM is so much more superior than the best DDR. THEN, bring that in the context of price/performance. And take into account that most DRAM makers will do their best to avoid paying Rambus if they can. The way I see it, Rambus has a chance to corner the big servers from SUNW, HWP, and CPQ. But I don't think it will make it to the main stream desktop (business or personal) anytime soon. This is because (a) most PCs are already more than adequate for the job and do not benefit from any improvements RDRAM brings on top of DDR. And (b) Rambus has to fight extreme resistance on the part of memory makers. So I find it more likely that MU, IFX, etc will get together and develop a competing technology rather than pay Rambus for it. The recent court ruling makes it so much easier for this. Now if there are reasons that over the next year 30%-60% of all DRAM sold needs to be Rambus', I am all ears. regards, ST

To: Knight who wrote (73111)	5/17/2001 12:01:11 PM
From: pheilman_	Respond to of 93625

Knight, great to see you lay out your two major assumptions: 1) RDRAM will eventually win out over DDR because it has superior characteristics which will become more apparent (and, hence, compelling) as CPU speeds increase. 2) RMBS has patents that allow them to get a royalty on all RDRAM sold. I would like to address them out of order: 2) No question, Rambus has patents on RDRAM, these patents have not been questioned and clearly give them rights to all RDRAM sold. 1) RDRAM will become more useful as CPU speed increases. No, RDRAM will become even worse as CPU speed increases. There are several aspects to memory performance. RDRAM gives up a few ticks in latency to DDR. This is a performance hit that gets worse as CPU speed increases. RDRAM has a bandwidth lead over DDR. This is of use for streaming applications. DDR speed is increasing rapidly. RDRAM has a large and growing cost disadvantage over other forms of memory. It is best to think of main memory as just a cache for the contents of the disk. So, a large main memory is better as more of the disk can be cached. For a given cost, right now, you could purchase 2.5 X as much DDR memory or 4 X times as much SDRAM memory. Admittedly the advantages of a cache start to level off as the size increases, but the slope of line is always positive. All main memory is changing in the future. Servers will continue to have banks of non-RDRAM memory. Which is a significant part of the whole memory market, despite the low number of servers vs. non-servers sold, simply because of the vast amount of memory installed in each server (as a disk cache). Desktop machines have had a shrinking number of chips of memory for years. I think that this memory will eventually become embedded to get better performance-meaning main memory market kind of goes away.

To: Knight who wrote (73111)	5/17/2001 12:19:46 PM
From: GVTucker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Knight, RE: My intention is not to engage in an argument, I really just want to know the facts, since that's the key to making money here. Unfortunately, investment journalists and analysts' public statements (for the most part anyway), are not a reliable way to ascertain the truth. That is for the most part correct. Historically, analysts' recommendations have shown to have no correlation to future stock price performance, either positive or negative. There's one exception, though. When an analyst who works for the underwriter of the company's shares downgrades a stock, there is indeed a correlation. It is probable the stock will not only underperform that market over the next 6, 12, and 24 month, but it will decline on an absolute basis. Note that the analyst for Rambus' underwriter downgraded the stock a week and a half ago.

To: Knight who wrote (73111)	5/17/2001 5:22:38 PM
From: Ali Chen	Respond to of 93625

Knight, "I seriously doubt that the author's statement fairly represents the view of "most analysts."" You are not very convincing here. The author of the article has done his research, and presented quotes from several analysts. How many? Three? Five? Nine! (if dropping the coverage is counted as negative opinion). To refute the statement "most analysts", you need to find at least equal amount of analysts who are positive on prospects of this company. Please do so, and post your results.