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

To: Gary Wisdom who wrote (17397)	3/16/1999 8:23:00 AM
From: REH	Respond to of 93625

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE JOHN BARKER ON SONY'S REVOLUTIONARY NEW PLAYSTATION Mar. 15, 1999 (INSIDE MULTIMEDIA, No. 188 via COMTEX) -- It will be at least autumn 2000 before Sony's PlayStation II reaches Europe, but already the reverberations are being felt. PlayStation II is a defining moment in the evolution of the PC, because it breaches the barrier between the computer den and the child's bedroom. Also, this development has could herald the death of the PC as we know it. As we forecast in our last issue the new machine will have MPEG- 2 decode cap-ability. What is not yet certain is that it will play DVD movies. But if it does then all projections on DVD disc sales will have to be revised upwards. That is not just because DVD games, music videos and entertainment titles will have pene-trated a new market. DVD sales will soar because DVD will have been legitimised in the eyes of millions who have been resolutely chosen to ignore DVD 'until the time is right'. It will certainly ignite the publishers into a frenzy of activity as they seek to penetrate the world's biggest potential market - the PlayStation crowd. Ted Pine of Infotech put it like this:. "The fact that Sony is coming in will bring the technology [DVD] back to the attention of all the game publishers and edutainment publishers. In the same sort of way that the original PlayStation really brought CD-ROM into the mainstream as a game medium, the same thing will happen if PSX2 is a similar success." Our sister journal MMWire said: "Sony's decision to support DVD- ROM, MPEG-2 video, and both Dolby Digital and DTS audio in its new game console means that DVD is finally ready for a mass-market debut. Sony is reportedly projecting that 15m PSX2 systems can be sold world- wide within 18 months. If Sony comes anywhere close to those numbers, the new system will be a runaway success on the order of the original PSX, and a shot in the arm for the DVD industry." Technical leap It's not just quantity; its quality. It is diff-icult to understate the significance of this announcement. It is a technological leap of the highest order. At the heart of the new machine is the 128- bit Emotion Engine cpu. Running at 300 MHz this has a memory bus bandwidth of 3.2 Gb/s. Most significantly of all it can handle floating point calculations at 6.2 gigaflops. This is possible due to recent advances in SIMD architecture. The graphics synthesiser in PlayStation 2 is extraordinary. It has a clock frequency of 150 MHz, a DRAM bus bandwidth of 48 gigabytes per second a bus width of 2650 bits (20 times that of your average graphics card. What does this technical mumbo-jumbo mean to the ordinary person? It means 3D graphics that are curvy, lifelike, indistinguishable from the real thing. It means uncompressed multi- channel DVD Audio of startling clarity. It means MPEG-2 video decoded without dedicated chippery. Above all, it means a whole new order of games. Remember that by 2000 the 18 Gb DVD disc will be a commercial reality. There's more. The new machine will have a i/o processor, supports IEEE1394 (Firewire), Universal Serial Bus (USB), PCMCIA and Rambus. The addition of a USB port means that a whole host of peripherals can be connected: VCRs, cameras, printers, keyboards, whatever. IM Analysis PlayStation II is good news for multi-media developers but bad news for a whole host of hardware and silicon manufacturers. For example the news seems to cast a shadow over the fort-unes of the Nuon processor from VM Labs. The news is also bad for Sega's Dreamcast. They went for Internet con-nectivity but not for DVD. Dreamcast uses CD-ROM media and a Hitachi SH-4 which delivers an estimated 2 million polygons/second. PlayStation II runs at up to 74 million polygons/second! Sega has also managed to botch the launch with production problems in Japan and the console will not hit the American market before the end of this year. The PlayStation II is likely to cost $400 at the start, quickly falling to $250. At that price serious gamers are likely to start saving up for a PlayStation II in the year 2000 rather than invest in a Dreamcast machine. The reason is simple: all the best games companies will divert their energies towards Sony. The massive amount of software in existence or in development for PlayStation makes the availability of software for PlayStation II by October 2000 a real possibility. It's not as if the developers are starting from scratch. What is less likely is that PlayStation II can be launched in Japan by March 2000. The technological challenge is huge. Having already spent half a billion dollars on R&D Sony now plans to spend a billion dollars on state-of-the-art chip production lines at plants owned by Toshiba and Sony. They are pushing the envelope with 0.18 micron silicon and Direct Rambus technology. This is something completely new. In short Sony has invented a computer which is not a computer. Will the rest of the world stand idly by and let Sony take over the universe? We think not.

To: Gary Wisdom who wrote (17397)	3/16/1999 8:30:00 AM
From: capt rocky	Respond to of 93625

you don't want to know what cienna did yesterday <gggg> Nec news is HUGE! think about it , even the analysts must pay attention to the first CO. to offer rmbs for real. everybody on this thread must know how this bird can fly. i ,for one don't want to be short! capt. rocky