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

To: Dave B who wrote (73270)	5/19/2001 8:41:17 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Dave B; Re: "I was responding to Carl's statement that as soon as SDRAM and DDR were the same price, manufacturers would rush to implement DDR. And since Micron is the market maker for DDR (and since the other vendors have said they'll have to match Micron's prices), we're at parity now." Since you're now the voice prophesying doom out in the wilderness, I could just ignore you, but you keep repeating this as if I haven't answered it already multiple times. First, you don't have Micron's prices, what you have are Crucial's prices. It is a bit of a leap of logic to assume Micron's SDRAM and DDR contract pricing from their retail pricing. Second, if Micron did drop their DDR contract pricing to their SDRAM level, that will not show up in products sold by those manufacturers until some time from now. Maybe you should learn patience. Think about how long you had to wait before HP and Compaq sold DDR machines, for instance. Third, you wrote "Micron is the market maker for DDR" and this is not true, in any sense of the word. DDR is available from 8 memory makers, and Micron was only expected to produce only about 7% of the DDR total for this quarter, as of the beginning of the year. It may turn out that Micron produces more, but Micron is not the market maker for DDR. Fourth, Micron is not the "market maker" for SDRAM either. So there is less significance to Micron's selling SDRAM at DDR prices than you suggest. What Micron is more likey doing is trying to convert their customers from SDRAM to DDR. They are not doing this by lowering their DDR prices to the market price for SDRAM, but instead by keeping their SDRAM at unattractively high rates, but offering DDR instead. This means that they make more money than if they sold only SDRAM, so it would be an attractive option. Note that if you go to Pricewatch, you will see that the cheapest DDR in the 256MB PC2100 category right now is by Nanya. By the way, Nanya hasn't signed with Rambus, and is also not in a suit with them, so much for Rambus' policy of signing or suing. It's fairly easy for Micron to convince the industry to convert to DDR because everybody already has the stuff ready to produce. That's why there's 360+ SKUs for DDR MBs on PriceWatch, a boatload more than the total SKUs for RDRAM based MBs. Fifth, as is shown by my PriceWatch figures, as well as the upgrade prices at HP, DDR is still a premium memory type. But I do think it hilarious that while the Rambus morons started with the belief that DDR would never be as cheap as RDRAM, they have now converted to the thought that DDR is already as cheap as SDRAM, and therefore a failure. -- Carl