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

To: MileHigh who wrote (14695)	1/30/1999 1:51:00 PM
From: Dave B	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

MileHigh, Possible Negatives - There was nothing at the meeting that added any additional negatives. I wasn't expecting an answer to the "Camino delay" question, which is the biggest possible negative I see. But, again, that's only a short term issue and has no effect on the long term story. Possible Positives - I had three things that were new news to me that were positives. First, I hadn't known that Intel decided to go with Rambus having compared it simultaneously to DDR DRAM and SLDRAM. That blew away any concerns I might have had that they were true competitors. There was a small possibility (really, really, really, really small, I thought) that they might jump ship if there were problems with Rambus. I don't believe that anymore. Second, since DDR also claimed a 1.6GB/s speed (using slower but wider busses) I thought it could be viewed as a potential competitor by some of the industry (and the latest announcements of 29 companies supporting it scared me a little). But since I now know that the Rambus buss can be widened (since some of the Rambus licensees -- Cyrix, Compaq -- are planning to do that) to give higher rates, I'm not worried about that any longer. This one is probably my own fault. I'll bet this is covered in the Rambus literature and I just didn't look closely enough. Finally, the third piece of good news is that the Rambus interface will be moving on to the processor directly. At that point, there's no competitive options at all. You have to use Rambus memory. I believe they only had one example of someone doing it today (again, I'll be the info is on the web site), but it makes sense that it will happen. My only question then would be whether Intel is planning to do it. As far as I know, which isn't far, Intel has always used separate chip sets. Maybe the Celeron has the chipset included and it would certainly be good news if Intel announced that the Celeron (and future low-end replacements) would support only Rambus memory. But I expect that's 2-3 years down the road. If anything else comes to mind, I'll add to this list. Someone also asked me in a PM what I thought of the management. I'll snip my response and post it as well. Dave B p.s. I'm not worried about the one-time charge. It is not a cash hit, and it really will be noticed and forgotten a day later because everyone knows that it's coming. And since we know it's coming, it's already included in the stock price. Only unknown events really yank the price around. Like warnings of flat earnings... <g>