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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: richard surckla who wrote (142747)	2/18/2002 12:24:12 PM
From: hmaly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575400

Richard, Re..Why did Tom 'Suddenly' Convert?<<<<< While this is a good article, I believe the article makes some major assumptions and omissions,. Yet now Tom's Hardware declares Rambus the memory of the future. “DDR slows the Pentium 4 to a snail's pace” is a headline that cannot easily be misinterpreted. Moreover, he provides benchmarks to show that the RDRAM advantage over DDR increases considerably at higher CPU speeds, so that a 2.4 GHz P4/RDRAM beats a 3 GHz P4 with DDR. <<<<<<< RDram may be the memory of the future for NW. But it is likely the original P4 was designed with RDram in mind. When Intel introduces the next version of NW, it could very well be designed from the ground up to work with DDr and get the same performance AMD gets. From Toms's article This makes it easy to imagine that the top PC systems (with Intel CPUs) will be equipped with P4/3000 and DDR266. Another fact is that the P4 cannot profit as much from DDR memory as AMD's Athlon XP. Also, there is the price difference, which only affects the retail business: the top processor from AMD (the Athlon XP 2000+) currently costs only about half as much as the top processor from Intel (Pentium 4/2200). In the OEM sector, the price for the entire platform is the crucial factor, rather than the individual CPU price. PC vendors are under enormous pressure to strictly adhere to the magical pricepoints that they advertise. Under these conditions, there are barely any chances for a Rambus platform. <<<<<<< Your article assumes P4 will be the processor of the future, and future processors will have to be RDram to get performance. However the article states the AMD XP gets the required performance from DDR. Wouldn't the logical conclusion from that be that AMD's processors will the processor of the future, because the P4 needs Rambus to survive; and maybe, just maybe P4 will be as dead as Rambus in several yrs. Now you can bet that the Intel board will assume P4 will be it, and therefore Rambus has a future. We are hoping for the opposite. The problem Rambus has always faced is the enormous success Team DDR has had in convincing the world that DDR is simple, easy, and inevitable, while RDRAM is complicated and probably will be gone in six months. <<<<<<< Most of Rambus wounds were self inflicted. It remains to be seen if the patient can recover. While it may be true that Rdram would have had greater acceptance without the i820 problems, and PIII problems; DDR didn't cause the problems; but rather took advantage of the problems. The general public will never know enough about memory to chose RDRAM on their own, excepting only a few percent gamers and a few other small categories. This is true even though RDRAM beats DDR in Pentium 4 benchmarks. The magazines and PC hardware web sites have to TELL the public, and IT buyers, what to buy. An excellent start is a headline warning that DDR reduces a Pentium 4 to a “Snail's pace.” Again,<<<<<< Wouldn't that be more of a warning not to buy either. At this point, it will be impossible to ramp up RDram to required supplies to avoid shortages and resulting high prices. The P4 loses most benchmarks even with RDram, much less DDR; so why buy a chip at twice the price with expensive rare memory. It won't happen.

To: richard surckla who wrote (142747)	2/26/2002 3:30:03 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575400

Congrats..........RMBS begins its redemption!<g> ____________________________________________________________ Rambus jumps 21 percent By Chris Kraeuter, CBS.MarketWatch.com Last Update: 2:51 PM ET Feb. 26, 2002 SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) - Rambus shares shot up 21 percent Tuesday on heavy volume after the company demonstrated what it says is the world's highest bandwidth PC memory module. Rambus, which designs memory chips used in computers, demonstrated the design on Monday here in San Francisco at Intel's Developer Forum. Rambus said its RIMM 4200 is the next milestone in its memory roadmap for higher performance computers. It uses Intel's (INTC: news, chart) newest Pentium 4 system. Shares (RMBS: news, chart) rose $1.39 to $7.39 - a high for the month of February. Shares have steadily slid from around $9.50 in early January when Rambus reported its quarterly financial results. This year's decline follows a much larger decline dating back to April of 2000 when the company's stock traded above $120. The company is mired in several patent-infringement suits with memory-chip manufacturers, including Germany's Infineon Technologies. The forum runs through Wednesday and Rambus will host a presentation tomorrow about motherboard designs in memory subsystems. Also, on Thursday, Rambus will deliver a public presentation to investors and money managers at the Robertson Stephens Technology Conference, also in San Francisco. Chris Kraeuter is a reporter for CBS.MarketWatch.com in San Francisco.