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

To: Boplicity who wrote (5613)	7/12/1998 5:23:00 AM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 93625

Gregory M., I spend a great deal of time lurking at this thread and rarely comment as I am not a RMBS investor. But I have to say that it appears to me that RMBS is guaranteed to earn a major portion of the PC market simply on the basis of INTC's leverage and marketing. The WEB site you mention and SmartMod's March White Paper at: smartm.com both seem to simply be pointing out that its not a sure thing that DRDRAM will get the entire market. The one area of weakness that concerns them seems to be latency. Even then in multiCPU systems of 4 or more, and thus the highest end of the server market, even this appears to be much less of a problem. The question may be how much of the PC market is truly impacted by the low latency performance of system main memory? At least I am of the opinion that if someone buys a PC with a much faster CPU in it; then uses it with the same software they have previously employed, they will be happy with the purchase regardless of the memory format. In my view this is the real value of INTC's leverage. Who will notice the latency drag? It could certainly be a problem if the machine is used for heavy multi-tasking. But this is a "comparative" problem and if there aren't a lot of PC's around performing the same real world tasks better, who's going to know? If DDR and 400Mhz CPU's had come to market a year ago, this story might have a very different outcome. Who knows. As it stands, RMBS is guaranteed a sizeable toe hold in the PC arena as soon as it ships and from appearances it will take at least a year or two for CPU speeds or software\applications to make DRDRAM's latency performance a problem which INTC's brand leverage can't overcome. The last time I looked INTC has pretty good control over CPU speeds. The real question I have is what will INTC and RMBS do when that day arrives. Is RMBS working on a proprietary solution for latency delays? The semiconductor technical and financial press seem to have no way to measure (and very little idea) at what point latency in fact becomes a problem for real world computing. Any comments or suggestions on where I could find such information would be appreciated.