Hi JD_Canuck; Re: "I found his information accurate ..." You mean he predicted that DDR would outship RDRAM by 4 to 1 in early 2002?
Re: "Rambus dumps RDRAM in future CPU's" BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
Re: "I am here looking for information relevant to my investing in a company i believe has a bright future." So you figure that listening to people who 2 years ago said that it's future would be bright, and that you should buy into the top, is a good idea.
Re: "Still wondering what your motives are, as they seem to be to trash any comments that may be positive in any sense and stop any meaningful discussion on the outlook for RMBS' future." Since you think that everything revolves around money, you'll never figure out what my motives are. For Zeev Hed's opinion on this see: #reply-13886800
As far as "trash any comments that may be positive", the problem is that you haven't looked very carefully at my posts. For example, read these ones: #reply-14379602 #reply-14705938 #reply-16070055 #reply-16304424
Let me repeat a post I made on cost effective memory selection for design engineers. This was back on June 14, 2000, which is approaching 2 years ago. Note that everything the bulls were saying 2 years ago has either turned out to be false, or has been indefinitely postponed into the future. By contrast, my analysis then still holds exactly:
Bilow, June 4, 2000
Rules for cost effective memory selection.
(1) Avoid ending up requiring a memory that is only available from less than four suppliers. The dearth of suppliers means that prices are likely to remain high. In other words, go with the commodity parts. RDRAM does not yet have 4 major manufacturers yet, and the price is sky high. More should come on line this year, so this is not a real concern for the designer making his choice today.
(2) Choose the cheaper package. Generally, this means use the older package until the technology no longer fits into it. An example of this is provided by the packages that the x16 and x32 SDRAMs come in. The x16 package is older, (and smaller), and is going to be cheaper. So in the absence of other influences (and there could likely be other influences), choose the x16 package. On the other hand, the x4, and x8 SDRAMs all come in the same package as the x16s, so choose whichever you like, they will cost about the same. Note that RDRAM has a very expensive package. Someday this will come down in price and will be a good choice for DDR-2 or DDR-1.5, but not for the next few years.
(3) Look up what the memory makers say about the future relative prices of the various choices. Surprisingly, they are pretty good at this, and will tell you. If you are a very big user, they will be happy to sign a deal with you where you guarantee to purchase a given amount over a period of time, and they agree to sell it to you at what seems like a pretty good price at the time. This is probably how Dell got its relatively cheap RDRAM. The memory makers are now talking about DDR being a few percent above SDRAM pricing by 3Q00. When they say this, they are talking about the pricing they give big customers who put in that kind of big orders in advance. When Intel tried to get them to sell RDRAM at 30% over SDRAM a few weeks ago, they refused. Given how much SDRAM has gone up since then, one guesses that there was more than just one reason for their refusing to deal with Intel. In any case, the memory makers have repeatedly stated that RDRAM is expensive to manufacture. This is about as big a clue as they can possibly give a designer.
(4) Make sure your design is compatible with as many memory types as possible. As an example, different manufacturers will frequently require different power-up initialization for their memory. In that case, create an initialization circuit that will satisfy all the chips requirements. (This is a lot easier to do than it sounds.)
(5) It is okay to design in a rare memory if it is compatible with a different memory (with less performance) that is available from more suppliers. VIA provides two examples of this principle. (a) Their motherboards that support NEC's VCM also can use SDRAM (and that is what the vast majority of them ship with). (b) Their new DDR chips will allow motherboards that can be stuffed for either SDRAM or DDR DIMM support. A special case of this rule is that you should try to make your design compatible with as many as possible of the different speed grades. That way procurement and marketing can choose which speed grade (and possibly system performance) to ship according to the market prices at the time. Another example of this rule in action is FCM. Toshiba is making it compatible to DDR and SDRAM in order to hope that it sneaks into a few design because of this rule.
Of the above rules, RDRAM passes rule #1, that is, there will soon be 4 or more suppliers on line. It fails rule #2, as it is in an expensive package. It is possible that Micron will bend this a little, but you would have to have the inexpensive packaging available from four memory makers before you could be sure that it would result in cheap parts. (Until then, it just makes Micron happy, as they slightly undercut the competition and make nice profits.) In addition, RDRAM fails rule #3, the memory manufacturers are bad mouthing it big time. Rule #4 doesn't apply to it. And since, RDRAM is highly incompatible with prior generations of memory, it isn't possible to squeeze it in under rule #5.
... #reply-13880098
Since June 4, 2000, the only changes I would make to the above post are against Rambus. That is, the situation is considerably worse now for them. (1) RDRAM lost another supplier with Toshiba, and Micron, Hynix and Infineon never ramped up. (2) RDRAM is still in the more expensive package. (3) Two years ago, Samsung and Toshiba had hopes that RDRAM would become the mainstream memory. Now Toshiba gave up the ghost, and even Samsung is only hoping for 15% by 2005. (4) DDR has proliferated all over while many of the RDRAM chipsets that were known about in June 2000 have since been cancelled. (i.e. Timna, MAJC, etc.) In addition, Intel has put full support for DDR across its entire product line on their roadmaps, and are talking about supporting DDR2 when its time comes. (5) Of course RDRAM still isn't compatible with prior generations of memory, and there is still very little support for it in industry. For example, Altera and Xilinx (the leading FPGA chip makers) still have absolutely zero support for any Rambus interfaces whatsoever.
Re: "All this and you claim never to have taken a position in RMBS, either long or short." Actually, I've been long RMBS, just not significantly, nor for any significant time. But I did announce it here on the thread. For that matter, I put out a call to buy it just a few weeks ago.
Right now, I think it's at a great price to get short. But it's not possible to predict stock price movements with anything approaching even 90% accuracy. With memory, on the contrary, if you're in the industry you can tell what is going to become mainstream and what is not many years in advance. If you're an amateur, it's harder to make these predictions. If you're an amateur and you ignore everything that disagrees with your desired result you're doomed to failure, LOL!!!
-- Carl |
