To: pheilman_ who wrote (77529 ) 8/16/2001 12:58:38 AM From: Dave B Read Replies (1) | Respond to PH,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. before they went after the SDRAM and DDR royalties, so that's not the issue. It wasn't that they wanted royalties on SDRAM, it was that they wanted royalties on RDRAM. Appleton and Harmon had their "fight" before the request for SDRAM royalties was presented. As for trading patents, sure it's a great idea, but are you saying that only those in the "industry" are allowed to come up with ideas that affect the industry?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
