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."

Comments

another article

[sometwo]

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

$158-Million Dollar Conspiracy

[stefanlasiewski]

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.

RAMBUS is crappy RAM technology.

[be-fan]

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.