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To: drew_m who wrote (73864)	5/29/2001 9:56:45 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 93625

Hi drew_m; Re: "I would be interested in how much is actually being sold. Anyone have those figures?" Those figures are proprietary to each memory maker, and are unavailable, particularly in real time. It would be nice to have them, it's just that no one publishes them. Instead, the various factions publish pump press releases that are long on promises and predictions, but short on actual current figures. So all we have are the retail and spot price sequences. Both of those show DDR slowly dropping towards SDRAM pricing. My guess is that Micron is dropping the DDR premium to a reasonable level in order to support the AMD SMP DDR machines coming out in a few weeks. The problem for RDRAM is that it is too expensive. This has been the case since it was introduced in late 1999. Since that time, companies ceased starting new RDRAM designs, cancelled a few ongoing RDRAM designs (like Timna), and started up DDR designs. It takes around 2 years to put together a chipset from the ground up, so about now is when the DDR chipsets are coming out. VIA, AMD, ALi, and SiS jumped to DDR earlier, or have shorter design cycles, so their DDR chipsets were first. But the basic problem for RDRAM is that there have been no new design wins since late 1999. All the Intel chipsets that have come out were designs that chose the memory interface before late 1999. What we are now seeing is what Intel had in the pipeline back in late 1999. What Intel put into the pipeline starting in early 2000 is the beginning of the transition to DDR (and SDRAM) chipsets for Intel. The first of these is just is just now starting to sample, it is the nose of the camel. Here's a list of chipsets for x86 CPUs, notice how many DDR chipsets are listed, and how few RDRAM. This is a sign that the industry doesn't think that RDRAM will ever get as cheap as SDRAM: DDR: 29 RDRAM: 7 users.erols.com At this point, it is too late for RDRAM to drop in price. The next generation of chipsets is already in development, and they are DDR, not RDRAM. If RDRAM were suddenly, miraculously, to drop in price, and it became clear to industry that the next mainstream memory was going to be RDRAM, it would take 2 years to reverse course, just as it is taking 2 years for Intel to reverse course away from RDRAM. But the pricing trend for RDRAM is clear, it is an expensive niche memory, therefore no one is designing it into future mainstream applications. -- Carl