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

To: Dan3 who wrote (81467)	3/8/2002 8:02:53 AM
From: SBHX	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Dan3, The zip disk was by iomega. That was another bubble story that blew up, but the drive was ok for a while. The reality with those cartridge systems is that there was a disruptive technology --- CD-R that eventually destroyed their primary advantages --- price and media mobility. In the same way, DVD-RW will displace CD-RW. Cost, capacity, performance wise, they could not compete As many others have pointed out, the disruptive technology that destroyed rdram's primary (theoretical-only) advantage --- lower pin count, were the inventions like the flip-chip and other packaging methods that allowed the pads of a chip to be placed in places other than the perimeter. This removed the pad-limited designs of many chips where the size of each die had a minimum size because of simple limits on how many pads you can place on the perimeter. If not for this, warts an all, rdram's advantage would be significantly stronger. When this invention happened, few people even realize that it would be so damaging to rdram's life. But like all disruptive technologies, when the time came, the momentum was unstoppable. ---- Actually on the subject of rdram's warts, the money page is below and the critical line is Paradox, an end-user relational database, is very sensitive to the latency of the memory subsystem. Database systems are clearly not fond of RDRAM's higher (pointer chasing) latency. aceshardware.com When you have a memory subsystem that is significantly slower in databases (and data-mining) applications, you don't get considered for many applications such as database and web servers. Since the low pin count argument no longer matters, Rambus' story will be more compelling if they figure out how to make these applications run faster. Since intel's architecture lab no longer will do any work to chase it down, rambus will have to get someone to spend some time in their labs if they want to know for sure why this is happening. SbH