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

To: Dave B who wrote (21247)	6/1/1999 5:21:00 AM
From: Dave B	Respond to of 93625

And one last point on this IBM thing... Just because IBM isn't (may not be) a Rambus licensee doesn't mean that they can't sell PCs with Rambus inside. All they have to do is buy motherboards from Intel and RIMMs from a memory manufacturer and stick them together. Intel and the memory manufacturer pay the royalty. If they've dropped their license, I would assume it means that they can't build Rambus RIMMS, they can't include Rambus interfaces in their ASICs, and they can't build any other chipsets that interface to Rambus memory. So the question is, is any of that important? If IBM has any significant share of the DRAM market, then I'm sure Samsung, NEC, Toshiba, LG Semicon, and Micron would be happy to pick up the slack. My guess is that IBM is pretty far behind TI (a Rambus licensee) in the ASIC market. And Intel owns the chipset market, probably followed by Via. Have I missed anything? Is there any key piece of silicon technology that IBM owns that, if it doesn't have a Rambus interface, there's no place else a customer can go to get it and the world will stop revolving? I guess my question would be, why did IBM bother paying for a license to begin with? Dave