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

To: gnuman who wrote (75506)	7/10/2001 9:33:27 AM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Careful GP, You are getting dangerously close to replacing Scumbria on Estephen's List.<vbg> Intel produces platforms that are specific to market segments. At spring IDF they showed four Desk Top segments for PIII/P4; Performance, Mainstream 1, 2 and 3. The segments are differentiated by price/peformance. DRDRAM is the "Performance" choice. The i845 is shown as the Mainstream 1 choice, and sharing Mainstream 2 and 3 with the i850. Can you tell us which of these "Desk Top segments" is best served by the RMBS platform as opposed to the DDR platform? From the customer's perspective, i.e., forgetting INTC's marketing needs, I don't see it. If the quote from INTC is both accurate and honest, customers will be voting with their feet and departing the Bus. RMBS is making a belated attempt to "segment" downward with the i4 silliness, but I will join RMBS counsel in "shocked surprise" if that frog ever leaps out of the frying pan. If Scumbria thinks the i845 will get killed wait 'til he sees what they do to the i4.<VBG> This INTC notion of leading the memory market around by the "segment" was always been an INTC pipe dream. In the end there can be only one memory platform and it won't be RMBS. 0\|0 P.S. Make that "one memory platform" for PC's. There's another platform for Com now and RMBS has already lost it.<g> P.P.S. Here's your link: qdrsram.com

To: gnuman who wrote (75506)	7/10/2001 11:35:16 AM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Gene, DDR offers an effective way to create a mid range PC that can be differentiated between the Performance, (DRDRAM), and low-end, (SDRAM), desk top. Whether the limitation to DDR200 is because of technical or marketing reasons isn't clear, but it still offers better performance than SDRAM. Why do you think this differentiation is needed? From what everyone says, if you're not running state-of-the-art applications, a PIII with SDRAM is fine (therefore I suspect a P4 with SDRAM will be fine as well if Intel kills the PIII). If you are running something that requires extra horsepower, however, you won't mind paying a little extra for the performance gain that a two-channel RDRAM system will provide (and 4i may reduce this difference even further). In this particular case, I don't see why Intel will feel the need to provide an in-between technology that isn't going to be as cheap as an SDRAM-based solution with perfectly adequate performance for office apps, or an RDRAM-based solution that will provide the best performance (under the assumption that Scumbria's assessment is correct). In other words, I'm not sure their 3-tier model is as applicable anymore since the Value segment can handle the basic office apps perfectly well. Or said another way, I think the greater cost adders that move a system from the Value segment to the Mainstream segment tend to be all the "other" parts of the system, such as better video, better monitor, larger hard drive, better support [based on my experiences with my father's e-Machines system--ugh!], more memory in the initial system, etc. and there's little need to support three different memory technologies to provide this differentiation. Not to say they won't do it. I just don't think it buys them as much as focusing on other areas might. JMOs, Dave