Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: John Stichnoth who wrote (19600)	5/3/1999 5:52:00 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi John, ya I'm just visiting here. I can always be found on the Art of Investing thread though. Before the Intel bombshell fell, I was considering going against the tape and buying RMBS, but now I don't know. I understand the point you are making about the importance of DRDRAM to Intel. This has been the essence of the bull case for RMBS. There are two issues to keep in mind. One is the technical merits of DRDRAM. There will be a technical paper presented on cost/benefit analysis of various kinds of DRAM (I found the original link here a few days ago). It essentially claims that DRDRAM is not any better than other DRAMs because most of the time is spent on memory latency rather than the bandwidth, ergo DRDRAM is not worth it. There are limits to how far this argument can go and the authors do agree that DRDRAM is scalable whereas other technologies are not. But the point being that if for now we can sort of do without DRDRAM, then perhaps by the time the bandwidth becomes more important than latency, other technologies are available. The other issue is that if the industry really doesn't want to pay for Rambus' royalties, then they can rally behind AMD (or power pc) as an alternative to Intel. Given Intel's paranoid nature, it is likely that Intel will accomodate them by droping the all out support for Rambus rather than risk losing market share. To be honset my VLSI design days are long gone and I don't know what the chances of either of these two cases is. One thing that I've learned is that no matter how dominant a company is, it really cannot move against the will of the entire industry (IBM's micro channel and Microsoft's "Java" are good examples). I am hoping that there are a few engineers here who can enlighten us to the technical importance and significance of DRDRAM. BTW, for a variety of reasons I think it is past high noon for Intel and from now on, they are en route to fall from dominance. But that is another tale. Sun Tzu