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

To: Rich1 who wrote (85844)	3/13/2003 7:59:21 PM
From: Don Green	Respond to of 93625

Intel finds itself playing catchup on memory DDR hammers and JEDEC wishes By Mike Magee at CeBIT: Thursday 13 March 2003, 23:33 theinquirer.net ALMOST A YEAR ago to the day Via showed the INQUIRER DDR-400 memory from Samsung. At that time a concept too far. But memory deals in nanoseconds rather than any other measure of time so use your inbuilt Windows calculator or maybe your Radio Shack scientific calculator to figure out just how many you get a year.* This time last year Intel was humming and hawing about adopting DDR, teasing journalists with hints and tips that it might still be using Rambus memory types and chipsets. But, let's face it, Intel is a strongly financial based company and if it can turn a margin by "innovating" or save a bit of money by making suppliers wait a little, well it all contributes to the bottom line. In fact, at the same press conference last year, Via was announcing support for DDR 333, another "standard" that Intel has lately succumbed to. The whole point here is that Intel, the "gold standard" of metrics and the like, can be persuaded to change its mind if the price is "right" or, on the other hand, if the price is "wrong". In that respect it's fundamentally full of hot air and wind. The "coincidence" between the 800MHz front side bus and DDR-400 memory cannot be chance. It accomplishes four fell strokes all at once. It practically destroys its Pentium 4 chipset competitors, it pushes every mobo firm plus its partners to take the route it's dictating, it ties up JEDEC under its capacious wings, and it probably doesn't produce much performance increase. Hey, Intel's a very successful business with good margins and process technology, terms and conditions, and the like to match. If shareholders are the same people as end users, well, so much the better. But if the marchitectural engineers get it right, it will be a fundamental paradigm change that not only boost innovation, but boots innovation, makes everything more closely resemble the Intel "gold standard", and with the right kind of benchmarketing will confuse end users too.