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

To: John Walliker who wrote (81401)	3/6/2002 9:37:29 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi John Walliker; I'm sure you have a peachy CV. Unfortunately, none of it has anything to do with volume manufacturing, of memory systems. For example: "I spent many years designing medical systems, some of them for implantation in the body. In this field engineering is about functionality and reliability, not saving pennies." The fact is that in high volume manufacturing of memory systems, *engineering is about pennies, functionality and reliability.* The sad fact is that to the extent you're a designer, you're a designer of Rolls Royces (or military tanks). Designing expensive cars is wonderful, but it has zero to do with the mainstream volume of the auto industry. Similarly, your high end engineering, which ignores pennies, has zero to do with mainstream memory design. Of course you liked Rambus, it meant that you didn't have to think about a cheap (but difficult) way of getting the same result. Your attitude on this was essentially identical to that of PTNewell and the original founders of Rambus. So, naturally, you bought their story hook line and sinker. A classic disagreement we had was over the question of whether it was possible to use DDR without the termination resistors. Since I'm an industrial engineer, I don't put down resistors without a damn good reason. You insisted DDR needed them because they were in the SSTL2 spec for termination. I knew (from experience) that they weren't necessary for point 2 point systems and a designer would eliminate them as they add to the power consumption and the BOM. The effect of resistors on the BOM is an issue that a lot of Rambus morons have found convincing, despite all evidence that resistors are amazingly cheap.) Well here's verification from Samsung that even their *600 MHz DDR is normally used with no termination resistors* and that for short enough lines you might get rid of the series resistors as well: ... [Drawing shows no termination resistors.] ... In case of short trace length (< 1.4inch), Rs might not be needed. ... samsungelectronics.com Also see Samsung's commentary on why the industry chooses DDR SGRAM instead of RDRAM: ... What is the advantage of using DDR SGRAM? ... * Most cost effective Next Generation DRAM to make Pricing will be close to SDR SGRAM Minimal cost adders on high-volume commodity Open architecture without royalties or fees ... Interface is changed from LVTTL to SSTL_2. This interface change is mainly to support higher data transfer rate. However, LVTTL interface is a possible solution for point-to-point operation. ... samsungelectronics.com By the way, one truly laughable part of our discussion over DDR vs RDRAM power consumption calculations is that after your calculations "showed" that DDR used 1.4x as much power as RDRAM, there was another incompetent that claimed to get exactly the same result! (Remember Alan Bell? #reply-11221475 ). I'd love to hear an explanation, especially given that industry has now firmly come down on DDR for notebooks. I think the only way that both of you could have gotten the same wrong result is that you were sitting next to each other. -- Carl P.S. Re: "Now why don't you tell us a little about yourself?" This is somewhat odd, given that you also wrote: "... you are not going to provoke me into disclosing the companies I consult for, nor the details of the products involved."