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

To: REH who wrote (17710)	3/24/1999 10:40:00 AM
From: REH	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Rambus RAM will once again be used in the next Nintendo machine. The total amount of RAM that the machine will feature hasn't been finalized yet. Rambus, best known for their high-speed memory, also produced Nintendo 64's RAM. link: geocities.com reh

To: REH who wrote (17710)	3/24/1999 10:45:00 AM
From: REH	Respond to of 93625

What's in the Cards for Chips H&Q analyst Rob Chaplinsky tells why the "chipless" microprocessor firms have a bright future and finds something nice to say (sort of) about Intel. By Eneida Guzman What's to become of the semiconductor industry? It's stumbling over slowing sales, shrinking margins, intensified competition and fallout from Asia's economic crisis. And share prices are suffocating at several chip makers that have been Silicon Valley leaders for years. Rob Chaplinsky, semiconductor analyst at high-tech boutique brokerage Hambrecht & Quist, admits that the group's near-term future looks rather bleak. But he sees promise in newer, less-traditional areas for growth in the sector that are just beginning to take shape. Instead of microprocessors, memory chips and graphics chips driving growth, he sees networking and communications applications used in modems, routers, switches and the like as the sector's biggest growth opportunity. He also likes a group of chip stocks that are known as the "semiconductor intellectual property" group, or SIP for short. In an interview from H&Q's San Francisco headquarters, Chaplinsky told Investor about the latest innovations at the "chipless" semiconductor companies, the difficulties of running a chip company without a fabrication plant to call your own and Intel's business prospects. The SIP Model What do you see as the most significant trend in the semiconductor intellectual-property industry right now? The most interesting trend is that a lot of companies are pursuing the new chipless semiconductor business model because the cost of capital and the requirements to compete in next-generation devices is just escalating. So some companies are pursuing this software-like semiconductor model as opposed to actually distributing and selling chips. Describe the business model. The SIP companies basically just design and distribute chip design via software or database. Someone else integrates the design, makes the chip, sells it and distributes it. This party usually pays a licensing and royalty fee to the SIP company. The SIP company is almost like a software company, but instead of selling a CD-ROM, they are selling semiconductor logic. In this group, I like Rambus (RMBS). It is a high-speed memory interface company for next-generation memory-chip technology. They have unbelievable patents and a very strong royalty-based semiconductor intellectual-property model. Do you expect this model to be successful? Yeah, I actually do. I think there are some natural hurdles that will happen because sometimes just connecting all the different parts of a chip together and hoping that it all works is pretty difficult. You have to implement a lot of standards and interfaces to make it work. But it does help companies come to market on next-generation devices faster because they don't have to reinvent every piece of silicon or transistor in there. They can reuse existing, proven blocks of transistors, and that's really what's attractive about it. The new deep-submicron semiconductor-fabrication process will enable companies to design systems on a single chip. What is the cost savings? A leading-edge, 5- to 7-million-transistor device takes several years to design, develop, verify and get into production. What the new process does is really shorten the design and layout and verification process by one-third or one-half. It's a significant savings of time and money. The SIP company is almost like a software company, but instead of selling a CD-ROM, they are selling semiconductor logic. People are moving from motherboard-level solutions to chip-level solutions, and that's what they're calling a complete system on a chip. In many cases that's where the value of these new intellectual-property kind of semiconductor companies come into play, because designing one big system on a chip is very complex. So if you can reuse proven and existing technology, what they call cores of transistors, you get to market much faster. Programmable Logic I understand that you believe the programmable-logic sector is one of the most attractive investment segments of the semiconductor industry. Tell us why. Programmable logic is where you can actually make adjustments to your chips and tune your chips in the field after manufacturing. The hardest thing about semiconductors is once you actually fabricate, it's basically fixed and you can't change it. However, if you have a programmable-logic device, you actually have some memory and programming capability in the chip to alter its functionality and tune it for a specific application after the actual chip is made. I think this will to continue to be used and become more important as the product cycles continue to accelerate. Are you concerned about price erosion in this segment? Yes. It's becoming very competitive. There are a couple of players who have large market share. And everyone is trying to grow market share. You have an environment where these programmable devices are trying to penetrate new markets where typically they are at a price disadvantage because they are offering this programmable premium, if you will. So, when they try to penetrate new markets, they have to be very aggressive in their pricing. That's what happened in '97 to this sector. The companies in this group were over-aggressive in their pricing. They have been trying to manage their pricing models a little more prudently in '98. I think the price erosion we saw in '97 will slow down in '98. With orders slowing down, economic conditions in Asia stalling market growth and the fact that we are moving towards a seasonally slower period for the group, which programmable-logic names make sense? I like companies that focus on the networking and telecommunications of semiconductors. The chip companies with exposure there that I'd buy are Altera (ALTR) and Xilinx (XLNX). Those are two good industry leaders in the front of the logic sector. One of your favorite stocks, DSP Group, is in the telephony space. Its fundamentals are very impressive and the stock is trading at a discount to its growth rate. Tell us about this one. I have a strong "buy" rating on the stock. DSP Group (DSPG) develops and markets digital-signal speech products targeted at the consumer telephone and computer telephony markets. Over 80% of the company's revenue today is derived from selling speech processors for use in digital telephone-answering devices. It's not very glamorous, but they have a dominant market share there. I especially like the company because of the other 20% of their revenues -- and 40% of their earnings -- are from licensing and royalties they receive from their DSP or digital signal processing business. I think the stock will experience earnings-multiple expansion as royalties ramp to comprise a larger portion of their revenue mix. Details -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Company Report 3-Year Chart Advisor FYI Earnings Estimates Insider Trading Show Intel You have lowered your estimates for Intel for calendar-year 1998 and 1999 to $3.09 and $3.62 respectively. They have limited visibility as far as a rebound in orders, and revenues are flat year-to-year. Do you see a turnaround on the horizon? In the past, Intel (INTC) used design processors for performance and it was a great business model as long as people were buying up in performance and they needed next-generation processing power. But I truly believe the application-software treadmill has really slowed, and Intel's hardware treadmill is exceeding the software treadmill -- meaning applications aren't consuming Intel's MIPS (millions of instructions per second) as fast as they used to. As a result of that, Intel has to now head in a different direction. Low-cost computer chips must be high on its list of options. Yes. Clearly, the low-cost computing trend is going to continue to accelerate. So Intel needs to develop products for those segments that are very profitable as well as products for the high segments, and that's a challenge near-term. Intel sells $25 billion worth of products a year. To sustain its historic growth, you need to start finding $5 billion industries where there are new opportunities for growth. There are not too many $5 billion industries around. As you get bigger, it's very hard to sustain the growth. I think what Craig Barrett will bring to the party as the new CEO is that he will start looking outside the box for new areas of growth. As far as a turnaround, I think there's still some downward adjustments coming [for Intel]. As far as a turnaround, I think there's still some downward adjustments coming. Some of those downward adjustments are already reflected in the stock price. Investors seem to be waiting for signs that orders will pick up and margins will stop going down and stabilize. As soon as there is evidence of that, a period of growth will follow. It will be interesting to see if Craig Barrett's leadership can steer the company to the same level of growth that Andy Grove experienced at Intel. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore put Intel on the map and Andy Grove put Intel on top of the world. Tough to guess on how Craig Barrett can repeat it. We'll know the answer to that five years from now. Facing the Coming Challenges Because of your belief that that the second quarter will be difficult for the semiconductor group, you remain fairly cautious. How much does the Asian economic situation factor into your caution? Asia is a significant reason to remain cautious on the group's long-term outlook. Initially, people were just attributing the correction to end-market consumption of the region. We're becoming more global, so I think that the impact on our domestic markets and sales is going to be at stake, too. The growth in the semiconductor capital-equipment area is definitely going to slow down. Asian countries no longer have access to capital like they used to. And we're seeing significant cutbacks in orders, as well as financial estimates of these semiconductor capital-equipment companies all related to Asia. At the same time, with the weak currencies in those countries, the costs for them are significantly lower and as they lower prices on exports that will make U.S. products much less competitive. That will dramatically impact us as well. Asia is a significant reason to remain cautious on the group's long-term outlook. In this environment, is it better for chip companies to have fabrication facilities or to be "fabless"? Three years ago the fabless business model, where you outsourced all your manufacturing, looked pretty attractive; however in the environment we're in, the fabless model for memory companies is pretty difficult because you need much tighter integration between design, manufacturing and logistics. In an environment where you have very large excess supply and inventory levels, you need to balance your needs and be in control of your costs so that you are actually more profitable. It's just basic economies of scale. The semiconductor industry is experiencing two below-average years of growth. With lower PC sales and falling chip prices, what is going to be driving silicon demand in the next few years? The PC market is not dead. I'm still a secular bull on the long-term growth of the PC market. Pricing is going to continue to play a role in that industry's growth rate. But PCs will continue to be the dominant consumer of semiconductors well into the next millennium. Steeper growth will come from the communications and networking applications side of the business. Companies that are selling digital-signal products, programmable-logic devices or ASICs -- which stands for application specific integrated circuits -- to the Ciscos (CSCO), Nokias (NOK/A) and Ericssons (ERICY) of the world will be the big growth drivers for semiconductors in the next three to five years.

To: REH who wrote (17710)	3/24/1999 10:50:00 AM
From: REH	Respond to of 93625

AMD Interview by Jonathan Hou and Krister 'fyodor' Nielsen FullOn3D: In a recent interview Shuttle stated that the K7 core logic was in alpha stage and that other companies were behind. They expected to have a K7 motherboard by Q4 99 which suggests that the K7 might be delayed. Will it be delayed and will we see the core logic introduction at the same time of the K7 introductions? AMD: We plan to introduce the K7 during the first half of this year, and to have all of the infrastructure in place (either from AMD or through our partners) to launch the part at that time. Interesting. I actually thought they had given up on 'their partners' first time around and would launch an AMD motherboard to begin with. FullOn3D: Will the first K7's run on AMD motherboards or is it expected that 'more standard' motherboard manufacturers will have chipsets/motherboards ready at the launch? AMD: Certainly we'd like to have motherboards available from other vendors at launch since this is not our primary business, however that may or may not be the case at launch time. When we reach the point when the K7 is ready to be introduced, we do not want to have to delay introduction pending infrastructure support. We are currently working with our infrastructure partners to ensure their development cycles are in sync with our planned production schedule. FullOn3D: Can you tell us about VIA's and SiS' and ALi's plans for K7 core logic? Do you have any specifications? Can you tell us a bit more about K7 core logic? AMD: Sorry, you'll have to ask each of these companies what their specific product plans are since I can't talk for them. We do continue to work with key core logic partners to ensure infrastructure products supporting the K7 are widely available. Keep an eye out for an interview with ALi, VIA or SiS in the near future... FullOn3D: Intel is hinting that it may be moving back to sockets by releasing a socketed PentiumIII and has already released a socketed Celeron while AMD seems to be going in the opposite direction with the K7. What are you comments on this? AMD: The K7 is a seventh generation processor that can take advantage of a high-performance infrastructure to deliver optimal performance. By using the Alpha bus technology, the K7 will support a 200 Mhz system bus (scaleable to 400Mhz) as well as multi-processing support. To achieve the high level of performance the K7 is planned to achieve, support for this new bus is required. FullOn3D: Is it true that the K7 does not use a "true" 200 Mhz bus, but simply a 100 Mhz bus that allows simultaneous forward and backward communication (similar to UltraDMA 33 and AGP 2X) which creates a bus equivalent to 200 Mhz? AMD: The K7 implements a version of the Alpha 21264 EV6 bus interface in which all transfers including data, address and control, occur at 200MHz. Thank you. That's what we wanted to hear. Now all we have to find out if the thing uses Double Data Rate SDRAM (DDR-SDRAM) or interleaves standard 100MHz SDRAM like the Alpha's... FullOn3D: What kind of (SD)RAM will the K7 use (initially and eventually)? Since the K7 is set to run on a 200MHz bus, one would presumably need 200MHz SDRAM... there have been some pretty wild rumors in this area (eg. double-sampling 100MHz RAM and such or PC200 or Rambus). AMD: We haven't made any announcement as to what type of RAM the K7 will support at launch or later. AMD has licensed the Direct Rambus high-bandwidth memory interface for use in forthcoming logic chips. This technology is planned to be the main memory interface for AMD's future personal computer products. Further details will be disclosed at AMD-K7 introduction. No mention of DDR-SDRAM... I wonder... My personal belief is that AMD will go with the Alpha method of interleaving two banks of 100MHz SDRAM. It's not quite as good as DDR-SDRAM, but it's cheaper and would allow me (umm... us) to keep my current SDRAM. FullOn3D: Will the move to 0.18mu take place with the Austin Fab first, or will both the Dresden and Austin Fabs undergo simultanious 'shrinks' and when will we see the first 0.18 micron CPUs? AMD: The Dresden fab is not expected to enter into full production until early 2000. Our shrink to .18 will occur during the second half of this year. WHOA! Hold on there! I thought the K7 was going to be produced exclusively at the Dresden Fab. Either AMD didn't answer our questions or something seriously strange is going on. First I thought AMD was saying that the Dresden Fab wouldn't convert to .18 micron processing until sometime in 2000 (after having reached full production capacity), but now I'm just plain confused. This will need to be clarified in the follow-up interview. Does it make sense for the Dresden Fab to keep producing .25 micron well into year 2000? Well, maybe. If they can get it up to 800MHz or so... That might sound like a lot, but remember that Alpha reached 700MHz with .35 micron processing technology (Ace's Hardware has some very nice articles on that subject, btw). FullOn3D: Will there be any design-changes to the 3DNow! unit in the K7, as compared to the K6-2/3 series? (ie. will it be faster?) AMD: We have not made any announcements related to updates of 3DNow! technology, although the technology should not be considered static. Well, that wasn't exactly what we meant. Guess we should have been even more precise... We were, of course, wondering if the K7 3DNow! decode/execution unit would be faster than that of the K6-2/III. Ah well, we'll get that done in the follow-up interview in about a week or two. FullOn3D: 3DNow! can improve the speed of 3D games significantly. We have seen many titles that appear to support 3DNow!, but have had a poor implementation resulting in an increase of less than one frame per second when using 3dnow!. Will this be the case with upcoming titles and why? How will you fix this? AMD: In the past, many of the optimizations for 3DNow! technology were put into place near the end of the production cycle. This was primarily due to the fact that the technology was introduced nine months ago and the design cycles for many of the more popular games are very long --- ie development began before 3DNow! was officially launched. We have now reached the point where we are working with developers from the beginning of their design cycle. Frame rates are not the only measure of the technology. Beyond 35 FPS or so, the human eye can't tell any difference. So the goal is not always to produce the most frames per second (although this can often be used to demonstrate the capabilities of a processor or an implementation of the technology) but to increase the overall gaming experience by implementing support for 3DNow! technology. On many games where frame rates are either locked, or adequately supported through normal processing power, 3DNow! implementations can enable support for additional features within the game that were once not possible or extremely taxing on the system. No. I won't go there. You can't make me! I will not be drawn into that whole 'the human eye can't see beyond 35fps' discussion. Suffice it to say... BULL! Ideally (action/FPS) games would allow for multiple settings for controling the detail level. To use the newest power phrase... I want an immersive gaming experience when I'm playing single player, but when I'm playing deathmatch, I just want it to go as fast as possible, while still showing me all the relevant details. And AMD can take their 35fps and... No. I won't go there... FullOn3D: There are currently many 3DNow! enhanced graphics card drivers out, but none seem to "shine". Instead of increasing the performance with each consecutive driver release, 3Dfx and nVidia drivers seem to be heading in the other direction (in terms of 3DNow! support). Is there any room for improvement in 3dnow! in drivers or is this what is to be expected? In the past, you have sacrificed much time in releasing Voodoo2 3DNow! patches for Quake that resulted in performance above a Pentium II. Will you be working with other chip vendors to generate the same performance gains? AMD: We have strong relationships with all of the major graphics card vendors, and we plan to continue working with them to ensure their products not only support the technology but also utilize the technology to increase performance. Our work with Quake II demonstrates the potential of the 3DNow! technology at both the software and video driver level, and we plan to work with additional developers so they can take advantage of the technology to produce other products that can potentially offer similar performance enhancements. All very fine and dandy, but nVidia still haven't gotten their act together and produced a 3DNow! optimized OpenGL driver. That's also one of AMD's problems: Having to rely on other companies to optimize their software/hardware specifically for AMD CPUs. With only 20% of the total market, this is still something of a challenge and AMD need to learn to work closely with all the software developers. At least they appear to be heading in the right direction. Before the introduction of 3DNow!, AMD did virtually no work with software developers. FullOn3D: Intel has huge marketing muscle. They say they have 300 million dollars set aside for marketing their Pentium III and SSE extensions. It seems that it will be relatively easy for Intel to crush 3dnow! simply looking at the money they have. How will AMD combat this? AMD: 3DNow! has some advantages over SSE. * 9 month lead in the market * established installed user base of over 10 million * established relationships with developers since before the technology was launched. * The PIII (the only Intel processor with SSE) is targeted at the high-end of the market, whereas 3DNow! is available in all of our processors. * We have a growing presence in the retail space (PC Data numbers for January show us with a larger percentage of retail sales than Intel). This is the primary market for the software developers, ie they want to reach the broadest possible user base to sell as many titles as possible. It is also my understanding that since both of the technologies rely on SIMD technology, once a software title has been optimized to support either 3DNow! or SSE, it can be easily optimized to support the other as well --- ie optimizations for one technology make implementing optimizations for the other technology much easier. I agree there. Once you start optimized a rutine for one SIMD type, it doesn't take much extra effort to do it for the other. As for the last 'advantage' AMD listed (the one about software developers): Someone tell them that! I've heard a couple ID people saying that they didn't want to focus on 3DNow! since AMD processors had such a small market share. (They still only have roughly 20% of the total market). FullOn3D: Although 3DNow! seems to have a solid lead over SSE in games, Intel seems to be way in front already in the non-games arena. Are you planning to actively support (and contact) developers of non-gaming applications to help spread 3DNow! in that area? AMD: Business application areas we have analyzed that will benefit from 3DNow! technology include 3D imaging, DVD playback, video playback, sound and speech recognition software (such as IBM's ViaVoice software). We continue to work with developers to help ensure support for 3DNow! continues to grow. This is true for developers of both gaming and non-gaming titles. Several non-gaming titles already support 3DNow! technology, including: IBM's ViaVoice, Nullsoft's Winamp, and Viewpoint's LiveArt '98 among others. What was it Intel said at one point? 'SSE will allow for incredible advances in speech recognition' or something similar. Well, looks like AMD is in on that as well. FullOn3D: Is AMD considering moving the K6-III to a 133MHz bus or any higher bus? AMD: We haven't made any public announcements about updating the Super 7 specification. Ummm... Well... if you had, we wouldn't have asked, now would we? FullOn3D: How high do you expect to be able to clock the K6-III with the .25mu process? How high do you expect to clock it with 0.18mu process? AMD: We have not made any public statements about future speed grades, except to say that we plan to make faster speed grade parts available throughout the year to remain competitive across all CPU performance levels. Let's hope so... FullOn3D: Why has the voltage on the K6-III been upped to 2.4V from the 2.2V of the K6-2? Is it true that there are low yields and manufacturing problems with the K6-III due to its on-die cache? AMD: We don't comment on specific yields, but I can tell you that the K6-III introduction has been very successful from our end and demand for the product has been tremendous. We did recently announce that the yield problem that affected processor frequencies and unit output in Q498 and the first two months of this quarter has been corrected. AS far as I can tell, the lack of K6-III's (in the US) is not so much due to low yields, but more due to AMD's distribution and announcement policy. For the last year or so AMD has announced CPU's when they actually started shipping them (and not when they were available to us consumers) and they have increased the priority of OEMs dramatically (or maybe it's just because they actually have some now!). FullOn3D: The CPU market seems to be very crowded right now. We have AMD, Intel, Cyrix, IDT, Rise and the rumored appearance of Transmeta. What do you think is essential to survive in this crowded market and how will AMD survive in this market? AMD: Combination of two things: competitive products and world-class manufacturing. We continue to expand manufacturing (Fab 30 in Dresden) to ensure that we can produce our processors in quantity and at a profit. We also aggressively innovate our processors. For instance, the K7 is planned to be the first seventh generation processor available from any CPU vendor, and follows the introduction of our sixth generation processor by a little more than a year. Yeah well, AMD still only have two Fabs. And as they admit themselves, the Dresden Fab won't reach full production for about another 12 months. In fact, virtually all of AMD's production problems stem from the lack of Fabs. Intel has something like 13 Fabs. They test a new process at one of them and when it works, they transfer it to all the other Fabs using a technique they call (rather creatively) 'Copy Exact'. FullOn3D: Cyrix seems to think that integration is the way to go for CPUs. Do you think this is true and does AMD plan on releasing integrated CPUs? AMD: We haven't announced any plans to introduce integrated CPUs. Our plan is to offer a broad range of processors that can compete across the performance spectrum. Currently, we believe this can be accomplished inexpensively and effectively without integrating additional functionality into the processor. But (IMO) integrated processors might very well have a big place in the mobile market where power consumption is everything. FullOn3D: Cyrix has been relatively quiet over the past year, but this year it seems as though they are back with the release of the "Jedi" CPU with an FPU 20% faster than a Pentium II plus 3dnow! instructions. This is expected to be a low-cost CPU which will compete directly with the K6-III. The K7 will be a high-end CPU. What are your comments about Cyrix's products and do you fear that you will lose market share to gamers seeking a low cost and fast 3D solution and why? AMD: We haven't seen any performance data on the Jedi CPU, so I can't speculate on perceived performance differences and how the chip will stack up against our products. We do not plan to loose market share, in fact we have publicly stated our plans to capture roughly 30% of the CPU market during 2000. As I said before, we plan to have a broad range of product offerings across the entire price and performance spectrum to accomplish this goal. There are several things concerning the Jedi that could give Cyrix problems. First of all they have to actually produce the thing - up to specs. They also have to design a better 3DNow! decode/execution unit than they currently have. Also, the 256KB on-die L2 cache of the K6-III should give the Jedi some big problems with 'business apps'. FullOn3D: Cyrix is hinting that it will release a Socket 370 "Jedi" CPU which weakens support in the Super7 domain. Will you be abandoning Super7 after this year with the end of the K6-3? Will all future AMD CPUs use the Alpha bus? AMD: The Super7 platform still has lots of life, and will be the platform of choice for users concerned with price/performance issues. We have no plans to "abandon" the Super 7 platform anytime in the near future. The benefits of the platform (2XAGP, 100Mhz bus) will continue to offer competitive system level performance. Note the 2x AGP... Does this mean that there are no plans for 4x AGP in Super7 motherboards? Maybe this question is best asked VIA or ALi... (I sense another interview...) FullOn3D: What price range should we expect from the K7? What maximum speed will the K6-2 reach and will the K6-III eventually replace the K6-2 as the low-cost CPU considering it is now mid-range? AMD: We have made no announcements as to the price of the K7. We plan to continue producing the K6-2 well into the future as the low-cost solution for the market. The K6-III will not replace the K6-2 anytime in the near future. Look at the benchmarks on our web site as well as other independent sources that demonstrate K6-III performance on par with PIII performance. The K6-III competes directly with the PIII, while the K6-2 will continue to compete with the PII and Celeron --- offering a superior combination of price and performance. We plan to have a broad range of product offerings that compete at various performance levels. FullOn3D: What are your plans for CPUs after the K7? Should we be expecting some sort of 3DNow! 2? Why did the rest of the alternative CPU world choose to adopt AMD's 3DNow! and not come up with a standard that merges all the instructions together? What convinced the other CPU makers to accept 3DNow! as the standard? AMD: We haven't made any announcements about our CPU plans after K7. We designed the 3DNow! technology in conjunction with software developers to ensure the technology offered the features they were most interested in. I can't speak for the other CPU vendors, but I can say that the technology addresses the major concerns currently facing software developers, and as such support for the technology is a compelling addition at both the hardware and software level. Well, actually, not all the 'alternative' CPU makers have chosen to implement 3DNow!. Rise (makers of the mP6) have chosen to go with Intel's SSE, although they have yet to produce a chip that supports any kind of SIMD. FullOn3D: Will future AMD CPUs be multiplier- or bus-locked like Intel has plans to do? According to Intel, this is to fight remarking of CPUs and not overclocking. Do you think this is true or is Intel trying to cover up the fact that they are also loosing potential revenue when people overclock their CPUs by 50% (CeleronA)? AMD: We have no plans to lock the frequency multiplier on our future chips. I can't speculate on Intel's motives for locking their CPUs.