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Technology Stocks : Semi-Equips - Buy when BLOOD is running in the streets! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ian@SI who wrote (5593)	5/28/1998 10:11:00 AM
From: Ian@SI	Respond to of 10921

Thread, It seems as if the DRAM bloodbath continues.... Competition Forces Memory Board Prices Lower In May May 28, 1998 Source: Nikkei America Nikkei English News via NewsEdge Corporation : (Nikkei Industrial Daily, May 27, 1998) TOKYO (Nikkei)--Retail prices of extension memory boards continue to decline in May amid intensifying competition. Personal computer stores in the discount electronics district of Akihabara, Tokyo, are selling 64-megabyte synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) boards for around 10,500 yen each, down about 11% from two weeks ago. Prices of 64-megabyte memory boards compatible with the PC-100 memory bus format promoted by Intel Corp. dropped 15% over the past two weeks to around 13,200 yen. The advanced boards costs about 30% more than conventional types, though the price gap is expected to narrow soon to about 10-20%, said sources at Mitsui Bussan Digital Corp. When first released in late April, the boards were twice as expensive as existing ones. <<Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Inc. -- 05-27-98>>

To: Ian@SI who wrote (5593)	5/28/1998 12:24:00 PM
From: HB	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10921

Re quantum computing: my research is in the theory of this stuff (mostly in the related theory of quantum information). (I am way over in the theoretical wing of things, so my knowledge doesn't have any application to semi equipment.) Maybe not practical in your investing lifetime, since we are at the stage of having max 4 bits of computer right now, in implementations that are hard to figure out how to scale up beyond about 10 bits. However, I think someone... maybe it'll be Kane... will figure out how to make scalable gate systems in some kind of solid state implemenation, and then we might be surprised at how fast they are developed. We are at the stage where it is hard to imagine rapid progress with the current implementations, but engineers and physicists are a clever bunch and there are now lots of them trying every weird idea they can think of. I think they find something potentially scalable within 10 years, and then the speed of development just depends on how cost (which will be moderately expensive at first) and benefits are viewed by the institutions involved. Unlikely to be a major revenue producer for the semi-industry in the next couple of decades though -G-. For some problems there is thought to be a near-exponential growth of processing time with input size for classical computers. Example of input size: length of the RSA key you use in encrypted transactions with Netscape. Example of problem: crack the encryption. Quantum computers can do these problems in time polynomial in input size, so even a quantum computer much smaller than current classical computers could be extremely useful for certain problems. If it's thought to be worth the money, 30 years looks like a possible time frame for that (useful, but smaller, quantum computers). Never is also a possibility (though I think not very likely). Cheers, Howard