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

To: Dave B who wrote (73231)	5/18/2001 5:49:56 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Dave B; " Normally, I'd agree with this last statement -- by the time DDR systems show up in volume (if ever), there won't be any profit to be made on DDR, either -- except that if Micron doesn't get the DDR volume bandwagon rolling soon, they'll be in an even bigger world of hurt with just (unprofitable) SDRAM to sell. So, at this point, they really need to do anything and everything they can to encourage the adoption of DDR as the next standard. They have no choice." The mainstream memory market is the SDRAM market. DDR can be made on the same lines as SDRAM, so it, too, can become the mainstream memory design. The only reason DDR isn't already as cheap as SDRAM is because there are fewer makers of DDR than there are of SDRAM. It's too bad for the memory makers that SDRAM prices are low right now, but all those low prices do is cement SDRAM as an even harder to dislodge mainstream standard memory. Just because an item is bad news for the memory makers doesn't mean that it is automatically good news for Rambus. There may be some more fab space available for manufacturing RDRAM, but there has been fab space available for this for many months and RDRAM is nevertheless very expensive. Fact is that RDRAM is a more expensive product to manufacture. As Scumbria and Jdaasoc have both repeatedly pointed out, the performance advantage of DDR (or RDRAM) over SDRAM for the system as a whole is minuscule, consequently DDR (or RDRAM) will only replace SDRAM if the pricing is near identical. What we are seeing now is daily crashes in the price of DDR. I took a quick look at Pricewatch, and it looks like when I update the figures in a few hours DDR will have made another massive step towards SDRAM pricing. When DDR reaches SDRAM pricing, the industry will switch. The daily drop in prices is an indication that Micron is hurrying this process along. It's not over yet, but DDR will eventually get there. Until then, DDR will only be bought by speed demons and the guys who have to be the first on the block with something new. The same would apply to RDRAM, except that Intel forced RDRAM on to the market by not supporting alternatives. When Intel supports SDRAM and DDR for the P4, this advantage that RDRAM had (a captive market), will go away. -- Carl

To: Dave B who wrote (73231)	5/18/2001 6:53:36 PM
From: gnuman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Normally, I'd agree with this last statement -- by the time DDR systems show up in volume (if ever), there won't be any profit to be made on DDR, either.... Ever get the feeling that RDRAM and DDR are solutions looking for a problem, or killer app? If broadband streaming data was thought to be the killer app, it may be a long time coming. Dvorak has an interesting article in the current issue of PC Mag, "The Myth of Broadband." (June 12). Clip, "I have a megabit line into my home office, and when I view a streaming video feed, I still get the herky-jerky 20-Kbs stream. The true advantage of broadband is realized only on FTP sites or peer-to-peer, where downloading is optimized for speed." Those performance results aren't surprising. If you compare the topology, those connected by cable are on a LAN, and those by telephone are on a "Star". In a Star configuration the user sees the full bandwidth his connection is capable of making. Those on coax cable are sharing already limited bandwidth, (the BW available beyond the TV programming). The users sharing the LAN to the local head-end are impacted by the number of users actively on-line. Basically, the amount of BW available to a user is inversely proportional to the number of users concurrently downloading. And being a LAN topology, there are issues of contention. Until fibre is widely available, I think the problem can only get worse. But, JMO's