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

To: Drake who wrote (17501)	3/20/1999 5:12:00 AM
From: unclewest	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

news techweb.com March 22, 1999, Issue: 1053 Section: News -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A tough move to Rambus David Lammers There is a belief in this industry that smart engineers can solve just about any reasonable problem given enough time. It's hard to dispute that. Think back a decade, when Japanese engineers confidently predicted that a 10.5-inch color LCD would one day cost less than $500. If you are not too worried about the next nine months, perhaps the same will be true for the transition to the Rambus memory technology. By this time next year, the yields and die-size penalties on the RDRAMs will hit acceptable levels, and the module makers will understand how to deal with the extremely tight specifications. But, now, many DRAM makers are furious about Intel's inability to ship the Camino chip set on time. "How can I go to my fab managers-who were told just a few weeks that Rambus memories had a high priority-and convince them again to replace their wafers holding profitable, high-yield SDRAM chips with Rambus wafers?" asked Jan du Preez, vice president in charge of Siemens' U.S. memory operations. Mark Ellsberry, in charge of DRAM marketing at Hyundai, said the Intel decision to delay the Camino rollout until the end of September has made it hard to maintain enthusiasm for Rambus. Given the uncertainties of the transition, Ellsberry said, "First, we'll put in a hand, then an elbow, then jump in." That was a much different tune than the one the industry was whistling a few weeks earlier. Dell Computer, which pushes the memory transitions harder than most other PC OEMs, got word of the delay just a few days before the Intel Developer Forum and remains "very, very angry," according to one source. And if RDRAMs are expensive, MIS managers may no longer ask Dell to build in that extra 32-Mbyte module or two . . . so cheap, so easy, so desirable. One worry bandied about is that the Rambus-based systems don't deliver much of a system-level performance improvement on most applications. Intel Fellow Peter MacWilliams dodged a question about performance gains at the the developers forum, saying "We are not ready to talk about that yet." While the Nintendo videogames derived a boost from the one or two RDRAMs on the board, it is undoubtedly harder to get that boost from two or three Rambus in-line memory modules, where the signals must traverse the module, through sockets. Plenty of smart engineers will need to put their whole brains into this one, or the Rambus program may not arrive in time to keep PCs moving forward. Copyright (c) 1999 CMP Media Inc. reporters do like to create controversy. it seems to me that a whole slew of companies have it worked out; sony, samsung, kingston and about 70 others.