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

To: woodside who wrote (18695)	4/15/1999 8:09:00 AM
From: Adam S	Respond to of 93625

Here's the notes from the conference call from a gracious poster on the Yahoo board: (as a RMBS long, I feel great after reading this!) messages.yahoo.com --------- Contract revenue increased Royalty revenue decreased due to slower sales of Nintendo 64 No new royalties expected this year Earnings will stay flat this year Turmoil in DRAM market can benefit Rambus Expenses are up due to hiring more engineers Rumors of technical people leaving are untrue. Gained engineers, not lost. Less than 1% turnover (excellent record for this industry). decreased tax rate volume shipments will begin in December Qtr, with Revenue recognition in the following quarter. Playstation 2 will use RMBS design. Eightfold increase in polygons/sec over the Sega Dreamcast. Uses 2 Rambus channels (3.2 GB/sec). For an item consider a toy, it is using twice the memory bandwidth of the best high-end PCs. PCs are going to need the extra bandwidth if they are to compete for entertainment dollars (argyle note: read about MSFT Windows 2001's ‘Digital Media Hub') According to INTC, camino was delayed not because of technology problems, but because they wanted high volumes of RDRAMs readily available. Intel has already shown-off the prototype “tour de force” PC which was using Pentium 3 with full spec 800 MHz RDRAMs, 4x AGP, and 133 MHz Front Side Bus. 4 to 6 manufacturers with fully compliant 800 MHz RMBS are expected to be out by Camino's launch. Four companies make the test equipment: H-P, Teradyne, Schlumberger, and (atlanta?) Mobile, low-power memory meets Intel's specs. The process of constantly improving RMBS has led to the rumor of a full-mask flaw in rdram. No such flaw exists. Expect price parity with other memories over time. Though expect large initial premiums when buying rdrams, as RAM would like to make money after three years of loses. Expect bandwidth advantages in multimedia, not typical business applications. Pentium 3 includes instructions for 3D that are memory bandwidth intensive No direct competitor to Rambus (1.6 GB/sec). SDRAM (200 mb/sec),133 MHz & 200 Mhz DDRs (400 mb/sec) mentioned, some technical info given on how their performance is much lower than 800 MHz RDRAMs. 200 MHz Sustainable bandwidth is also in RDRAMs favor. NSD/Cyrix has developed a 2 channel RMBS interface & CPQ is developing multichannel interfaces for its alpha servers. *comparing apples to apples, RMBS is better. 6.4 GB/sec if RMBS uses 64 data pins, if you want to compare to other 64 bit memories (1.6 GB for DDR – 800 mb/sdram). Q&A: Questions from Dan Niles about revenue recognition and percentage of market using RDRAM in 2000…RMBS doesn't recognize revenues until 1 quarter after shipping. The die cost/overhead should be 10%. Since many RDRAM manufacturers rushed without shrinking die size, many will have a higher cost. To answer the other question, Dataquest's survey expects greater than 50% market penetration by 2001. Dan Niles: “so your basically shifting out three months”. Affirmation Question from WDR about 700 MHz speed: “A range of speed & price bins for manufacturers…mention of Intel's SDRAM safety net in case of shortage of Rambus. Can lead to price premiums for RDRAMs. Question from H&Q about milestones set for next quarter and what will prevent PC133 from squeezing in: It would perform like SDRAM 100. There is no performance advantage for PC133, or it would be very minor improvement over 100. Eliot Glazer (forgive my spellings) question about Industry articles talking about JDEC DDR2 running 2 to 3 times faster than DRAMs. Answer was dismissive. More or less, article says “possibly as early as 2001” and earlier data indicates it will be about 400 MHz while RDRAMs are already at 800 MHz now. S.G. Cowen question about what share/percent of revenues will come from Playstation 2 vs. PCs: Roughly four times more PCs and they have roughly four times as much memory, so Intel will have the bigger impact by ten or more times. Mr. Harmon talked about maintaining flat earnings. “…could have trouble maintaining flat earnings. Will have to do something about this. The DRAM manufacturing turmoil could help. There are 3 or 4 potentials out there, maybe half will happen which would allow us to recognize the revenue.” Question from Joe about the 810E and does it have PC133, is the 810E a midrange chipset, potentially making RMBS the memory used in high-end PCs: basically, answered with “Intel said they aren't supporting 133's with this upcoming generation of chipsets.” Another question from Dan Niles concerning how soon we can expect to see DELL & CPQ PCs to ship with RDRAM. Is September possible? ...I got tired of taking notes, so I stopped, but I believe the answer was: when 820 ships, rdrams will be available, and the revenue will be recognized the following quarter.