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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."
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!
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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.
Here's another article that dislike rdram. http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/rdram.ht ml
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...