To: Sun Tzu who wrote (73166 ) 5/17/2001 7:08:16 PM From: Dave B Read Replies (1) | Respond to ST,The lost time that I was refering to was the time that got spent developing DDR. Even though Rambus does not make the chips themself, my guess is that if they had lowered their royalty payments, there would have been less drive to develop a competing technology. no royalty payments. You can't build much of a business if you're giving it away. <G>Their mistake was, IMO, to stop there not garner support from others. is more expensive to produce (test, etc.), many of the vendors took a wait-and-see attitude re: producing RDRAM. Samsung is really the only vendor that appears to have embraced RDRAM. If, by chance, RDRAM does become the next standard, Samsung is probably the only vendor that will make extraordinary profits off of their early production (I'm not sure if the same rule applies, but when I was consulting for one of the hard drive manufacturers, the rule of thumb was that all the profit to be made on a new capacity was made during the first six months -- if you delivered your version of that capacity more than six months after it first appeared, you made no profit on it.).It seems to me that a great product, that is one which meets both the producers' and the consumers' needs from both economic and technological POV, does not need a heavy handed support from Intel. Why is it for example that Sun Micro did not choose to standardize on RDRAM? What about all the other other non-PC products out there? RDRAM is not in a better market position not because Intel was slow to build a CPU for it, but because the memory makers did not want to build it unless they absolutely had to. was a lot of resistance to building RDRAM chips. It required new investments in test equipment, provided lower yields, et cetera. Only time will tell which MMs made the right decision.
