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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gary Ng who wrote (36169)	8/18/1998 1:28:00 AM
From: d[-_-]b	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570343

Gary, a share repurchase adds to the value of the stock holders current position. A dividend is a direct distribution of cash, which requires overhead (check printing) and taxes on it's recipients. I would hope, even naively, the directors have a good idea of the future (profit potential) of the company. Therefore if they gave out a large cash dividend I would suspect they have little faith in the companies near term prospects. A stock repurchase gives the opposite signal in that investors and the investment community are emboldened by such repurchases as a sign of future strength/faith by the directors. Utilities pay higher dividends as they usually have pretty dismal growth rates, along with legal limitations on how much they can charge thus how much they can make. This is the classic retired/conservative investment vehicle.

To: Gary Ng who wrote (36169)	8/18/1998 1:47:00 AM
From: Petz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570343

Intel pushes expensive, low performance memory technology tomshardware.com Isn't Rambus going to be really fast? Remember, there are two kinds of fast - low latency and high bandwidth. Rambus offers extremely high bandwidth, but has slower latency than even standard SDRAM. Its slower latency will compromise CPU performance, but its higher bandwidth exceeds the ability of the CPU to use. This does not translate to "fast"... Doesn't Rambus run at 800MHz? It is described as 800MHz DRAM, but the bus actually runs at a 400MHz clock with a double data rate approach like AGP and DDR SDRAM. In order to hit this clock speed, the bus width had to be reduced by 75%. At 16 bits wide, it is not wide enough to issue commands to the DRAM in the standard manner. It must packetize and serialize the commands and data between the controller and the DRAM chip. This adds delays in the path between the chip set and DRAM, resulting in slower access latency. What is "Fake Rambus"? Because of the uncertainty of Rambus, Intel is developing a version of the Rambus Memory Module that doesn't use Rambus DRAM at all. It uses SDRAM. This type of module may be cheaper and easier to get than "Real Rambus", but its performance will be even worse than Rambus. Each module will have an additional translator chip that increases latency further, making fake Rambus probably the slowest high speed memory on Earth. Intel may even use "Fake Rambus" to demonstrate how Rambus is faster than SDRAM. Don't fall for it. This article will focus almost entirely on Rambus performance issues. But, there are several other barriers that the OEM and user will face if they choose to adopt Rambus. We should expect Rambus to be rather expensive. It has a large die and a new and expensive packaging technology. It burns a lot of power and introduces new challenges regarding cooling and power management. For the first six months of its life, Rambus platforms will not be able to support a memory capacity of more than 256MB. This seems more like the minimum configuration for a 500MHz Katmai platform, not the maximum. These and other issues will be covered in future articles. For now, lets dive in to the performance analysis. /end of quotation/ Dr. Tom did a computer simulation of the latencies and throuput of "true" RAMBUS and compared performance to standard (not even DDR) SDRAM. Three types of applications and 2 types of computer architectures were compared at clock speeds from 333 to 667 MHz. /resume quotation from article/ Of the 96 comparisons, only 34 showed an increase in performance while 62 configurations showed a decrease in performance. The biggest performance advantage was demonstrated on processors and platforms aimed at the mid range and the low end. In these high-end systems, users pay hundreds of dollars for performance improvements of just a few percent. The unfortunate reality appears to be that Rambus will take some of that away, while probably driving the system cost up even higher. This is a strange thing for a CPU vendor to do. Why would Intel deliberately promote a memory type that reduces CPU efficiency? I can't answer that, but I must point out that the same question applies to the 740. Why would Intel promote a graphics chip architecture that needlessly sacrifices CPU performance? In the case of the 740, Intel potentially degrades CPU performance by 10% in order to save a few dollars in graphics DRAM. Then, in the case of Rambus, Intel reverses its position and asks us to pay a premium for DRAM, while still suffering a reduction in performance. The whole thing seems terribly screwed up. It seems to me that users are willing to shell out a few extra dollars to ensure that they have sufficient graphics memory, but I don't think anyone wants to pay an excise tax on all of main system memory unless there is a clear performance advantage. Doesn't this seem obvious? Does Intel see this? If so, what motive could they have for acting in this counter-intuitive manner? /end of quotation/ The end of the article, at tomshardware.com shows how enhanced SDRAM (ESDRAM) improves performance by 8-10% *... and costs less!* I think the fact that Intel OWNS A BIG CHUNK OF Rambus, Inc., and hopes to make proprietary memory standards has a lot to do with them pushing this technology. Petz