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Why Dr. Tom Dislikes Rambus, Inc.
homerj79 writes: "The good Dr. Thomas Pabst has posted his feelings towards Rambus, Inc. and why he, and his site, are so critical of the company. Here's a bit from the article I found interesting: 'When Intel 'decided' to go for Rambus technology some three years ago, it wasn't out of pure believe into technology and certainly not just 'for the good of its customers', but simply because they got an offer they couldn't refuse. Back then Rambus authorized a contingency warrant for 1 million shares of its stock to Intel, exercisable at only $10 a share, in case Chipzilla ships at least 20% of its chipsets with RDRAM-support in back-to-back quarters. As of today Intel could make some nifty 158 million dollars once it fulfills the goal.' It's a good read for people thinking about investing in RMBS. Something seemed fishy over at Rambus, and now I know what it is."
Once upon a time Intel tried to innovate.
.oO0Oo.
the Pentium series may have started life as a traffic light controller but Grove and Moore demanded a lot from their engineering team and got it.
Their relationship with M$ did get pretty cosy but it was never a perfect marriage that the word Wintel would suggest (see Inside Intel http://www.webreviews.com/9711/inside_intel.html here).
However as the company grew they seem to have inevitably lost touch with their engineering roots. Pressure from other manufacturers has always hurt them bad.
The Register has a good take on it here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/000525-000009.html
Rambus is a brain dead attempt at fencing people in to non-commodity memory. Especially ironic as Intel have been burned by memory production once already (when the market went commodity). I'm sure everybody (except Rambus Inc.) is pleased that it looks like it's heading towards a spectacular failure as it would drive the price of memory up for no good engineering reason.
It's an expensive foray for Intel and co. probably one that we'll end up paying for in the end one way or another.
I hope they learn a good lesson and go back to chasing Mhz.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Your Beta analogy is more apt than you know.
The reason Beta failed was because SONY tried to push Beta forward alone. They didn't want to share the VCR market with anyone and wanted to control the standards.
Unfortunately, everybody jumped onto the VHS bandwagon (and basically told Sony where to stick their licensing fees) and the inferior VCR format prevailed.
Right now, while RDRAM is a very forward-thinking step, it's usefulness compared to a well tuned SDRAM system is next to negligible.
RAMBUS and Intel keep spouting off about how future generations of RDRAM will be more powerful. Well, that's in the future. Right now, RDRAM is an expensive, proprietary, uncecessary boondoggle.
Some day we WILL have to go to a serial memory device like RAMBUS. But that day hasn't come yet.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I read the intel/rambus/warrants thing a few when it was posted, and it just didn't ring right to me. Here's why. The warrants issued have a value of about $160 Million. While this is not chump change, it doesn't mean ALL that much to intel. Even if the value doubles to about $300M, it still isn't enough to sway intel from a technical path that they see as 'right'. If you search back through the news, early in 1999, intel spent a LOT of money greasing the palms of Ram makers to kickstart RDRAM production. These 'gifts' came to a LOT more than $160M, I seem to recall them giving one manufacturer about $500M to get started (I am to damn lazy and tired to look up the links right now). They spent WAY more to jumpstart RDRAM production that they will EVER get from the value of the rambus warrants. In my mind this discounts the money theory in my mind. This leaves us with the question of why is intel proceding along such a STUPID path. They could switch over to PC133 at any time. If VIA can make a chipset that does it, intel can do it in half the time, and better (no matter what you say about intel, they have a LOT of tallented engineers. Look at the BX chipset. Nothing comes close. If they do the same thing with PC133 memory, and all the bells and whistles, look out world, and via). The only question is wether management will let them do it, and why not? I only have one theory here, control. Intel has long been, like MS, a company that controlls standards. If you control standards, you can shape the market and reap HUGE profits be being first and best at everything. Intel made the PC66 standard, and was, for a long time, the best vendor of PC66 based chased chipsets. They bobbled with PC100, and other vendors took over the technology lead. Intel quickly caught up, but WAS behind for a while. They are not in the ballpark now with PC133, and it is hurting them. They went from nearly 100% of the chipset market a few months ago to about 60% now. That has to hurt. And until they get thier production act together (september-ish?), the situation will not get much better. Couple this with the fact that they were collectively bitch-slapped be the DRAM vendors recently, and the future doesn't look to good for them. One thing that will get them back into the lead quick is owning the standards. They can then produce the best chipsets first, and set direction. $160M isn't enough for them to stick with a losing technology. Controlling the marketplace is. THAT is why I think intel is sticking with rambus.
I don't, but its a story of a better technology losing the market. why? i can only imagine that it had a good deal to do with consumer stupidity and a great deal to do with movie studio deals to put their movies on the inferior videotape format due to marketing and good ole $US.
Does RAMbus really suck? i have no clue, but their management team has shown themeselves to be creative and willing to put their balls on the chopping block. $158 million may not mean much to Intel, but ill bet the people at rambus have more than that on the line -- and it DOES mean something to them.
Now, im sure we all would agree that buying market share is not a healthy capitalistic practice, but do you think Intel would be wasting their time for $158 million on a technology that was anything less than adequate? i wouldn't think so.
everyone here loves the newest/fastest/bestest stuff, but in the real world we rarely get it in our hardware -- think about why there is not a HARDWARE equivalent of open source software...its called factories -- bring on the nanobots!
__________________________
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
say it is, then it affects revenue on all the lines that are supposed
to use Rambus.
I agree with Tom's that RDRAM isn't right for commodity PCs, but I
don't buy the conspiracy theory (beyond the fact that Intel would love
to lock PC manufacturers into a proprietary technology). Rambus is an
ambitious technology, with lots of potential, and Intel backed
it because they believed it would perform better than it did. They
might be forced to change their mind, but we will just have to wait
and see, a surprise isn't impossible.
There is a war between Intel and AMD. It is for the future of not only the desktop PC architecture, but the server architecture and the
.18-m process coppermine cores while other plants are converted to .13+copper Willamette and McKinley cores. AMD does not have the fab capacity to do this while maximizing profits. It's fab capacity is better used for Athlon/T-bird/Duron cores and flash memory.
.13-micron and copper-interconnections if required.
soon-to-be-booming gaming console/internet appliance architecture. The basis for this war is about as complex as the alliance structure that resulted in WWII. The catalytic event that launched this conflict was the Anti-trust case (and victory) against Microsoft.
Microsoft had effectively controlled the architecture by controlling the OS environment. This will soon be over. The next big thing will be embedded OS's in gaming consoles. Intel and AMD are vying to dominate that market.
The stuff you see on Tom's Hardware and Anandtech are distractions. Those are feints and skirmishes aimed at press ink and enthusiast mindshare. No one ever said that the world is fair or that the best technology has to win. Rambus IS the best technology, and the only DRAM technology that can
scale right now to keep up with Moore's law. DDR is a legacy bandaid.
The real war is being fought between AMD and Intel among the DRAM manufacturers and silicon foundries of Asia--Korea, Taiwan and Japan. The game is to get AMD and Intel to pay for DRAM conversions and partnerships. DRAM manufacturing has been a VERY marginal profit business for the past decade--look at the consolidation that has taken place in Japan and Korea. The DDR vs. RDRAM war give the industry a chance to make a huge amount of money. They are all holding these hostage to the highest bidder --AMD vs. Intel.
This is why the X-Box victory for Intel was such a big deal. It was the opening salvo in the war. Personally, I believe that the X-box may never be built. But the announcement of Intel's (and Nvidia's) victory has implications for the DRAM wars--it showed that Intel was willing to build the CPUs for the X-box for free, or at cost. Why? To deny the market to AMD, of course, but even more importantly: to ensure that the next generation of Win32-based games for PCs and consoles would use Intel's SSE extensions and architecture enhancements, not AMD's 3D-NOW. Intel could do this because THEY ARE HUGE--they have the fab space to make at-cost coppermine chips. It gives intel a production base through 2004 for
Taiwan has positioned it's quasi-government-owned semiconductor plants to play the crucial part in the next phase of the war. You may notice that
Samsung, and Micron, Hyundai, NEC and the other DRAMurai constantly issue conflicting statements about their production plans for DDR vs. RDRAM. This is not just bad reporting. This is a strategy: they are asking Intel and AMD, "how bad do you want it?" "How much are you willing to pay?"
The main pressure has to be on the stronger contestant: Intel. If they pressured AMD too much, they would lose leverage over Intel's wallet. They are using upstart AMD as a stalking horse to get Intel to pay for the conversion to RDRAM production and guarantee profits. Very nice profits from producing RDRAM.
The thing is, consortiums and cartels are weak things. Intel is constantly probing the fissures in these relationship. One weak link is Hyundai --it desperately needs cash, and Intel is dangling $200 Million for RDRAM production. But the weakest link is Taiwan. Taiwan's companies (Mosel-Vitec excepted) are not part of the seven Dramurai. None of Taiwan's main semiconductor companies design DRAM. These companies are also the tightest-knit of any of the major Asia companies. Samsung and Hyundai compete fiercely. NEC, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Fujitsu compete fiercely. And Taiwan holds a unique position in the semiconductor world: 80% of the contract foundry/fab capacity in the world is on Taiwan. When VIA-a fabless design shop--needs to build it's chipsets, it turns to TSMC, UMC and Winbond, Taiwan's home-grown, government-sponsored foundries. When Nvidia or 3DFX need a place to make their graphics chips, they turn to Taiwan. When one of the DRAM manufacturers needs quick capacity, they turn to Taiwan. These are state-of-the-art foundries, using
Below the Taiwan government, there is a huge conglomerate called Formosa Plastics Group. It's founder is probably the least known and wealthiest
billionare in Asia. Under the FPG umbrella are subsidiaries like VIA and TSMC, and also "strategic partners" like FIC--interlocking boards, cross-investment, patent sharing, the works. The Taiwan group is just waiting for Intel to pull out it's wallet, IMHO. VIA would love to settle the Intel patent infringement suit and ITC complaint. It desperately needs a partnership with Chipzilla for it's own (formerly Cyrix) CPU plans to succeed. So, the news [that VIA is working on an RDRAM chipset] needs to be read in this light--it is NOT yet a victory by Intel. It is a probe, a signal by VIA that it is ready to talk.
VIA does NOT need a Rambus license to design and build a RDRAM chipset. The license needs to be held by the FOUNDRY. TSMC, UMC, and Winbond ARE ALREADY RAMBUS PARTNERS. The foundry PAYS the ROYALTY. It's all there at http://www.rambus.com.
So the war is far from over, but I think that Intel is very close to playing the Taiwan option. That is the whole point of the lawsuit against VIA: not to break them, but to leverage them against AMD. VIA had assumed a KEY position as AMD's partner. AMD NEEDED VIA to build the chipsets for Athlon and thunderbird/duron, and to build the DDR-SDRAM chipsets as well. THIS IS NOW IN DOUBT: Aces' hardware had a story a few days ago about the fallout between AMD and VIA over the KX133 chipsets incompatibility with the Thunderbird and Duron CPUs. AMD now says that the first DDR-SDRAM chipset will NOT be from VIA, but from ALi. Acer Aladdin (ALi) is one of the few big Taiwan companies that is not connected with FPG. This is a desperation play by AMD. ALi is not even in VIA's league.
DDR-SDRAM's share of the PC main memory market will be virtually zero this year and the first 1/2 of next year. If you look beyond the BS, Look at the KX133 chipset for Athlon. It came out in January. It is now June. You still can't get one from any of the major vendors like Gateway or Compaq; they are still using motherboards with the obsolescent AMD750 chipset(no AGP 4X, no PC133 DRAM, incompatible with GeForce cards, crappy HDD controllers). The taletale is to go to Gateway or Compaq or any of the others and look at the system specs: if they say AGP-2X or PC100 SDRAM, it's the old AMD750 chipset. That's SIX MONTHS.
Realistically, that means that the first volume shipments of ANY DDR-SDRAM computers won't be before March 2001. IMHO, June 2001 is more likely. This assumes that they work. I'm getting suspicious that the DDR-SDRAM meetings are not already demonstrating production chipsets. IF DDR-SDRAM WAS A SLAM DUNK EASY THING, SOMEBODY WOULD HAVE ALREADY DONE IT. You would have seen a high-end workstation company like SGI, SUN, DEC/APLHA/COMPAQ, INTEGRAPH, or SOMEBODY do it by now. This is not the slamdunk they want you to think it is.
Assuming DDR-SDRAM can be produced for volume system sales, it should be usable in any application that today uses SDRAM--obviously video cards, but also other applications. I still think it is the last trick they are going to pull out of SDRAM; you will probably see seom systems produced, and then they are done.
When Willamette is introduced, I think it will answer a lot of questions. We will see what the best semiconductor design company on the planet (Intel) can do with a from-the-ground-up platform intended to take full advantage of RDRAM's unmatched bandwidth. If Willamette delivers, I think that the DRAM companies will produce RDRAM in volume, but it is going to cost Intel dearly for the misteps of the past year. The DRAM industry is not going to risk another i820 fiasco--Intel is going to have to write them an insurance policy.
Sorry this is so long. I'll just add:
Tom Pabst IS SUCK!
---
Very well sir.
Anandtech forum Rambus article part 1
Anandtech forum Rambus article part2
seemed very clear at the start, but more vague to wards the end with 3000 warrants being issued here, there and every where to whichever chip manufacturer produced RAMBUS chipsets the fastest.
Is this not a form of cartel ? Is this not a dedicated attempt to replace a large user installed base hardware system ( SDRAM ) with a technically inferior - or at least similar system that provides costs more.
I just bought a new motherboard from ASUS and had a devils job getting a PIII board that still supported SDRAM. ( the SC2000 ) there was little choice at all. ASUS may have other boards listed on their site, however the vendors can't buy them. Only the RAMBUS ones.
I'm not trading in my large investment in RAM (384M) only 6-9 months after buying it ! looking at the article - you shouldn't either. Unless you enjoy lining Intel's pockets.
Sorry for the above length.. High points:
-Current IA32 CPU's and single tasking/single threaded software ( like quake ) does not present too many opportunities for multiple-concurrent memory access.
-Deeper pipelining and ever more advanced add-ons to IA32 in addition to AGP and faster DMA devices ( such as gigabit-ether and RAID drives ) would provide greater concurrent load for a memory device.
-Multi-threaded/process services such as file-serving, web serving, etc on a multi-CPU system can provide high main-memory load ( defeating virtually any caching system ) and requiring a greater need for intelligent mem-access management ( as with SCSI elevator optimizations for disk access ). Being able to service more than one mem-request simultaneously is more valuable than servicing a mem-request more quickly. You can double, or quadruple throughput easily by going to an n-way memory system instead of increasing mem-latency by 50% each generation.
-Memory Blahs: DRAM is based on leaky capacitors ( pseudo-batteries ) which must be recharged, and pre-charged in such a way that causes serious performance lag, especially when you change which row is being accessed. Thus the "rated" speed of all DRAM chips is misleading if you do not understand this. 200MHZ DDR-SDRAM is it's burst speed. Dozens of clock cycles are consumed when non-optimal adjacent memory accesses occur. This is a fundamental flaw with DRAM and is present in most architectures ( RDRAM included ). Thus, only speeding up latency can never fully resolve this problem.
-[DDR-]SDRAM is designed for high-speed dumping of closely spaced regions of memory (within a row) in a serial fashion. Higher bandwidth allows the faster flushing of internally cached hits, but there is still a severe latency between accesses. An ideal ( though costly ) advancement might be to produce multiple interleaved "channels" of [DDR-]SDRAM in order to handle multiple concurrent memory accesses. I have seen no indication of this direction in motherboard chipset manufacturers, and thus doubt it's feasibility. This solution is typically found in high-end workstations ( See SGI's visual NT station or many RISC servers )
-RDRAM is designed with the idea of multiple channels from the beginning. Sadly, it's radically different architecture means an extreme introductory price which would only decrease in higher production volumes. RDRAM did not turn out to be as glorious as would be hoped. BUT, most benchmarks I have seen deal with non-server apps in single-CPU environments. Thus scores were only marginally better.
-Intel's incentive. Tom leads us to believe that Intel is trying to make a quick buck on RDRAM. I have suggested that Intel absolutely needs an RDRAM type solution ( if not a normal interleaved solution ). Pipelining ( in both CPU and GPU ) allows the masking of memory loads ( some-what ), and thus Intel is migrating towards higher-latacey tolerant CPU's that are capable of ever increasing number of outstanding mem-requests ( which is facilitated by RDRAM and it's like ). Ultimately, Intel will move to IA64, which is completely designed around massive pre-queueing of memory accesses. Without massively parallel memory interfaces, IA64 will be even more memory starved than Alphas ( due to larger instructions ( 40 + overhead vs 32 bits/instruction ), and the heavy usage of speculative mem-loads ). I believe that IA64 will be significantly slower than IA32 unless a more advanced memory structure can be used. Additionally, I believe that IA64 will be far better suited to RDRAM than IA32 ( due to the above ).
Intel NEEDS RDRAM ( or something like it ) to succeed for fear of IA64 flopping. Introducing IA32 to i820 and RDRAM is supposed to ease the market into acceptance. I doubt they care about lowering the price for IA64 ( since it'll be astronomical in and of itself ), but you need to at least encourage chip manufacturers to get the bugs out early.
Rambus, on the other hand is just trying to keep their business going.. Thus they're having to give incentives out here and there ( that's just standard business ).
I think Tom is being a little emotional in saying Rambus / Intel are evil. Rambus needs customers, and Intel needs a better memory architecture.
No, Rambus is not a cost-effective solution to single IA32 CPU systems. It definately is not worth the price for single tasking systems ( such as for gaming ), though it might still work well in periferal contention situations ( 2xNIC + SCSI + RAID + CPU ). I would be curious to see RDRAM's benchmarks in IA32 mult-CPU configurations with multi-threaded / processes apps, of course.
I strongly believe that RDRAM is a good match for IA64 and possibly 4 CPU configurations ( where memory costs are not going to consist of too much of the overall package ).
Last and strongest point: Tom and many other techno-journalists, though very valuable in their insight and general contributions, are often seriously single-minded and emotional. I believe that they should spend a little more time being objective and trying to analyze the _why's_ of corporate America; looking at things from their perspective from time to time ( and actually comment about it ). You make a much stronger voice when you show an understanding of the situation, rather than preach to the choir and make ASSumptions.
-Michael
-Michael
Here's another article that dislike rdram. http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/rdram.ht ml
But its not just $158 million, its a big chunk of rambus. And if it becomes the dominant form of memory in the world, then the stock price will just keep going up, and the dividends from that million shares of stock will start adding up. Also Intel will have some say in what rambus will be doing and will be able to force it into helping them stay on top. Also intel doesn't pay rambus royalties, AMD would if they made a chipset that used rambus, ya can't beat that.
Furthermore, executives get compensated largely through options. Options have an strike price, the price that you pay for the real shares if and when you exercise the option. Your income when you do this is the difference between the share price and the exercise price, but the exercise price must be, more or less, the price of the stock when the options are granted. So, executive compensation is not based on overall profits, but on growth of profits, and here is where the $158million looms quite large. It is a very significant number to Intel's executives. In the long run... wait, today's Intel executives care less about the long run than Intel's shareholders do.
It's an option to purchase 1 million Rambus shares at 10$ each.
Tom's numbers come from the fact the right now, Rambus shares are priced 168$. That means that Intel can exercice those options and purchase 168 millons' worth of shares for only 10 millions.
Now, back in march, Rambus shares were worth 471 at one point. That's 461 million of free money for Intel if they had exercised their options back then.
Intel is probably hoping that they can drive Rambus to such high prices again, and therefore make huge amounts of money.
Actually, my reason was for the lack of multiprocessor support. I am irritated at this whole Rambus business because I just put together company systems with rambus...a whole product line of them. I knew it was expensive. I knew the tactics used (at least in some respects). But the fact of the matter was it did offer an increase in performance on the applications we are using (scientific computing). I also know that 6 months down the road when DDR SDRAM is out, I will probably be dropping the rambus thing... but of course, Intel will be putting out IA-64 around then and I'll have to evaluate it...and it'll use rambus or some similar expensive tech.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
One would think that after Tom posted "Voodoo is dead forever" last year next to a paid Nvidia ad on his website, while extolling how his website is "unbiased" nobody would pay attention to this loudmouth hypocrite anymore.
As for the $160 million dollar deal, I do not see what is wrong with it. Companies give incentives to each other all the time, and holding equity in other firms is a great way to cement relationships between companies. Intel takes in $37.4 BILLION dollars in sales every year, and owns major stakes in dozens of high tech companies.
I do not see what is predatory or wrong with this.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I'm no fan of Intel, but Tom's accusations seem like a stretch to me.
In 1999, Intel made $29-Billion in revenue. It doesn't seem reasonable that Intel would gamble such a large part of it's reputation on a shoddy product get a piddly $158 Million dollars (Well, I guess that's piddly). They probably spend more then that on advertising and marketing in 1999.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Yep, you heard right. RAMBUS RAM is crappy. Sure it runs a 800 MHz, but at what cost? It only has a 16 bit data bus, which greatly affects latency. As Tom has pointed out before on TomsHardware.com, high power 3D apps (read: games) use comparitivly little bandwidth, but need low latency. Even one of the most demanding of these apps (read: Quake) uses only about a few hundred megs of bandwidth. As such, DDR-SDRAM is a much better choice, because
A) It provides much lower latency.
B) It is much cheaper.
C) It has just as much bandwidth.
There is a reason the latest GeForce cards aren't using RDRAM. (Aside from the cost.) DDR-SDRAM is a much better memory technology. The only real reason that RDRAM has made it even this far is that Intel wants a little piece of the memory game.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...