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

To: richard surckla who wrote (21449)	6/2/1999 10:20:00 AM
From: richard surckla	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Tom's Hardware... www6.tomshardware.com By Tom Pabst Camino is slowly on its way ... It's time for a new Slot1-platform. Intel's BX-chipset is out for about a year now, and whilst nobody is really complaining about its performance, the technology has to step ahead to create new business in the chipset and motherboard area. At the beginning of 1999 we still expected 'Camino', Intel's upcoming 820-chipset, to be released by June of this year, but due to the exorbitant price of the memory type that's needed by Camino, Intel delayed the launch to the end of September. Camino will provide a new CPU 'front side bus'-clock of 133 MHz and it will use the new and proprietary RDRAM or 'direct Rambus RAM'. RDRAM is using a completely different memory interface than EDO or SDRAM and it's supposed to offer a memory bandwidth of up to 1.6 GB/s. It has to be plugged into the new 'RIMM'-sockets and due to the fact that it's no open technology, every memory manufacturer has to pay license fees to Rambus for each sold RDRAM RIMM. Unfortunately RDRAM is currently several times as expensive as SDRAM and it is rather questionable if it will offer us a substantial performance gain. However, since Camino will also bring us AGP4x, offering an AGP-peak-bandwidth of about 1 GB/s, more memory bandwidth is needed to feed AGP 4x properly. The current peak-bandwidth of PC100 SDRAM is just about 800 MB/s, which is even less than the AGP 4x-bandwidth, so that AGP 4x wouldn't make much sense running on a platform based on the current memory technology. Still it's questionable if it will indeed take RDRAM to satisfy the requirements of new software and future AGP 4x hard and software. Camino is also supposed to support SDRAM, but it will take a special converter riser-card to translate the serial Rambus memory interface into the parallel SDRAM memory interface, let alone the latency issues it would cause. All in all, Camino doesn't look too promising right now, since it will increase system costs one way or another, if it should be a very high price for RDRAM or a still respectable price for a riser card that will only bring you very moderate performance. CONTINUED: Is there any reason to get all excited about 133 MHz FSB, 1.6 GB/s memory bandwidth and AGP 4x?

To: richard surckla who wrote (21449)	6/2/1999 11:23:00 AM
From: Brooke S	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Regarding Intel and the internet.... Richard your post regarding Intel and the internet, I'm not sure you actually have egg on your face.... Supposedly Intel does intend to begin generating revenues on the internet without selling more chips, via an E-commerce hosting strategy. However how you relate this to Rambus specifically >that can only mean they are doing it with RAMBUS TECHNOLOGY< I did'nt follow since I assume they will host this on big Merced boxes. Brooke ########################## By JOHN DIX Network World Fusion, 04/23/99 NEW YORK -- Intel this week surprised Wall Street analysts by using a securities briefing here to reveal that it will enter the Web hosting business. Halfway into a four-hour briefing hosted by Intel President and CEO Craig Barrett and featuring talks by other top Intel executives, the company disclosed its intentions to build what it is calling Internet Data Service (IDS) centers. Gerry Parker, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's New Business Group, says the plan is to become a leader in hosting, storage and delivery of Web content, a business that is forecast to grow to $12 billion by 2002. The idea is to bring scale to a market that has been dominated to date by smaller players, and to put an emphasis on reliability. "We want to bring our experiences running factories" to the hosting business, Parker says. "We know something about building large, efficient factories and keeping them running all the time." He even goes as far as to call these data centers "bit factories". Asked what experience Intel has that would encourage it to tackle this market, Parker says building semiconductor fabrication plants has taught Intel how to build large scale global facilities. The company is familiar with scale economics, capacity planning and even running 24-7 data centers. What's more, it will employ its time-honored practice of perfecting a plant design at one site before building exact replicas at other locations worldwide. Intel is currently building a test and development data center at a company campus and expects to complete it in June. The first production data center, IDS1, is supposed to go online in September. IDS2 will open in Europe in the third quarter, with worldwide expansion scheduled for the first half of 2000. The data centers will range in size from "small" shops housing up to 2,000 servers and costing about $50 million to build, to large shops with up to 5,500 servers that will cost about $100 million. All of the IDS centers will be networked so content can be distributed. Just how that will be achieved was left unanswered. Intel's first customer is Excite, which two weeks ago entered into a codevelopment agreement with Intel to develop an online shopping service. Not all observers are convinced that Intel's skills are easily transferred to this type of venture. Carl Howe, director of computing strategies for Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., sees Intel getting into the Web hosting business as a "big stretch." Howe, who launched GTE's Web hosting business back in 1994 says, "It's a tougher business than people think. Hosting content for another company is very different from hosting your own." Among other things, Howe wonders about the competitive implications for Intel. After all, at the same analyst briefing the company described how it would be using its powerful new Pentium III to chase the ISP server market, which is a traditional stronghold of Sun. "If I'm UUNET, am I going to want to buy a ton of Intel servers if they compete with me for hosting business?" Howe asked.