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

To: Dave B who wrote (77525)	8/16/2001 12:14:19 AM
From: pheilman_	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

IP-only companies are possible. The issue is getting IP into a standard, without revealing it, then extorting high royalties after the standard becomes popular. In this field each company has a vast number of patents to trade with each other, to some degree to lock out new competitors, also for defense. If the IP is sold in a free market each company evaluates whether it is worth paying the royalty to increase sales/profits. Rambus extorted money from Hitachi, for example, by threatening import restrictions on their customer, Sega. Not really a free market for IP. Keep in mind that Sega and Hitachi were the earliest volume users of SDRAM, several years before Rambus got their patent on SDRAM. Sorry, let's get right to that evil part, the stuff just doesn't work very well. Making a bus narrower and much faster is simply bizarre, for decades data busses have gone in the other direction. Faster signals mean more power, more radiation, tighter tolerances, and additional costs for terminations. It is an academic approach and was rejected by everyone but Intel. (It is going to be fun to see what Intel was thinking. It has been about as counterproductive as the microchannel bus in terms of controlling clones.) See, all of the problems can be handled, but the original premise is where the mistake was made. And as CPUs got faster, and had larger caches, either latency was the most critical to the performance, or more often main memory (DRAM) served as a disk cache and only size was important.

To: Dave B who wrote (77525)	8/16/2001 12:25:01 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Dave B; In addition to phielman_'s comments I'd like to add my own to this issue (that of the value of IP). We can imagine a "Zeev Hed" world where all products infringe on all patents, and patent holders rule the day. That would not be a world I would prefer to the current one, nor is it one where Rambus would have had any particular advantage. Any major memory maker has more patents on DRAM than Rambus, and more significant patents. All they'd have to do is split off their IP from the mother company, get out of the (unprofitable) memory business in the next downturn, and make big coin from their IP houses. It's a way of doing business, and the world would go on, but it's not an efficient way of running an economy. It would be rule by lawyer, and what's worse, it wouldn't even be predictable. Huge fortunes would be made and loss on esoteric patent regulations and the nuances of words like "bus", LOL!!! What kind of world would that be? I'd rather see a world where companies competed with each other on the basis of the best technology. If we were to go to a world where a knowledge of obscure patent regulations determined the winners, I would win in that world. In fact, I'd make a boat load more money than I make in this more fair world we do inhabit. But I don't like to see people and companies rewarded for other people's work and that was what Rambus was trying to do. (A jury and U.S. Federal court agree with my interpretation of the events here, so take the paranoid Rambus dementia about how they invented SDRAM and tell it to a Bilow in the alternate, Rambus fantasy, universe..) -- Carl