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

To: Bilow who wrote (75498)	7/11/2001 2:38:21 PM
From: tinkershaw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Bilow, I will agree with you that RMBS fortunes going forward do depend on Intel continuing to innovate and lead the market going forward. If Intel were to change its character and decide to join the pack of AMD, VIA, Ali, etc., it would be a long hard winter for Rambus and an even longer one for Intel. In this we agree. This said, Intel's most adhered to motto in producing product is to lead, innovate, and DIFFERENTIATE. What Intel does is innovate, set the new market standards and then race to make this innovation obsolete before its competitors get too good and mimicking it and creating a commodity market out of the product. What we are seeing now is that it took Intel 5 years to move to the new P4 architecture. Too long of a period of time. During this period the AMDs and Vias of the world got real good at producing this product. Things got even better for them as Intel had difficulty executing on its plans to finally obsolete the PIII and move to the P4 architecture. The 820 was, to be kind, maybe the messiest product launch in Intel history and certainly was not nearly as good on a price/performance basis as to what AMD was offering. So certainly AMD took market share. But what we are seeing now is INTC getting over the transitional hurdle and moving into more mature P4 production, rapidly obsoleting what came before it at a pace that I have not seen for sometime. At the same time Intel is aggressively cutting prices while aggressively increasing performance as it plans to move to the .13 micron process that enables both of these things. Someone can correct me here, but I believe AMD will not be able to follow INTC into the .13 micron manufacturing process for at least one year after INTC begins its ramp. Given this factor, there really seems to be no reason for INTC to give up its two decade old marketing scheme. It all seems to be working very well as the P4 matures. Why would Intel want to stop differentiating its offers and join the pack? What advantage does it gain by not continuing to innovate, set new standards, rely on new software to consolidate those new standards, differentiate, and then rapidly move on to obsolete that product once competitors get good at mimicking it? Answer, there is not any. But, this is not to say that Intel won't bring lower end DDR chips to market. I was re-reading a paper I did last October and to my surprise I mentioned this very possibility in the context of signaling within this industry. But I love to talk marketing strategy and could go on and on. The point being is that INTC, unlike what some other Rambus shareholders think, will bring a DDR equipped 845 to market in 2002. It might even utilized DDR2100 and not just 1600 as currently planned. However, this is a one time chip. There is no follow-up on the roadmap. And I believe INTC will quickly move to obsolete the chip as it moves the low end to 2 ghz or so by sometime in 2003. If you want latency, talk about a fully-loaded DDR memory at these speeds vs. RDRAM, then we will talk latency. But to conclude, yes there is one DDR desktop chipset in the works for INTC. It is an interim chip. A chip that will attack the low end and continue to spank AMD where it counts, and a chip that will be quickly find itself obsolete without any follow-through with future DDR chipsets. Tinker P.S. That is of course for some reason people become as disenchanted with RDRAM computers as they do with genetically altered crops. Not likely, but never discount anything.