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Hitachi Folds, Rambus Keeps On Rolling
macsen writes " Yet another company gives into Chipzilla's memory mongers, and it doesn't bode well. Hitachi appears to be going for an upfront settlement, and an agreement to drop litigation between the company and Rambus. Two companies in less than a week, and the Third Law of Thermodynamics begins to take hold.
See what
Tom's Hardware has to say." Check out a more informational original link. This is most ungood - see the first folding, as done by Toshiba last week.
Maybe so, but that's not the problem. The issue is, Rambus is trying to take an equal-performance (and cheaper) alternative to it's product and raise the price through royalties so it's not as competitive on the market.
Rambus claimed that the poor performance on P2's was due to slow CPU speeds and that faster CPU's would show how RDRAM shines. Well, between Tom's Hardware and the last review posted on here (don't have the link-sorry), on identical high-end P3's it's just barely the equal of SDRAM (at over twice the price). It shines in data streaming - one high-latency memory query, then lots of data flows. What SDRAM is good at is little file queries - I want to open a Word doc that's 4k. By the time RDRAM finishes it's slow query my SDRAM has already delivered the page...
If the world was fair, what people would do is boycott buying RDRAM modules, systems, etc. and buy more SDRAM. Enough to offset the higher royalties with economy in volume. Who cares if they're paying royalties - the chip makers are selling lots of SDRAM, there's no demand for RDRAM so they don't produce it, Rambus stock hits the toilet, then the royalties stop when Rambus goes bankrupt.
The world being what it is, the Rambus royalties will price SDRAM almost as high as RDRAM, people will put off buying it "until the price comes back down", by which time RDRAM boards and RIMMS will be more common. Big royalties to Rambus, lots of happy Rambus stockholders, lots of locked-in consumers. Gotta love the 'free-market' economy...
In a recent Intel press release, the company announced that boards that worked with both SDRAM and Rambus memory were being recalled because the systems were unstable. The systems were to be replaced with a new board with Rambus installed. The press release also announced that Intel was selling off their stake in Micron, which, as you know, manufactures SDRAM. This is a relatively obvious move on the part of Intel to distance themselves from SDRAM.
Soon customers will be forced to buy a more expensive and lower performing system because Rambus is bullying other companies around. They must have a good case. They probably got a very general patent on "fast memory" from the US Patent Office. Way to go, USPO!
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Again we have a company that makes Rambus products (and gets Rambus warrents for this) settling with Rambus. When a Rambus prevails over a company that does not make Rambus memory, I will start to worry bigtime. Till then I approach this one with suspicion.
For me, RAMBUS is yet another example in a long string of Things That Should Have Failed. Rambus didn't win on technical merits, nor did it win on a better price point, no - it won on the basis of a bad decision by Intel and some legal wrangling. AMD quietly adopted Rambus, and even went as far as to make it so their next generation CPU will not take anything but Rambus.
As a consumer and a citizen of this country, I find this to be a failure in the capitalistic system. What happened to "equilibrium price" and competition to keep it down? It seemingly was thrown out. I blame it on government inaction, but others might blame it on government action - as this was caused directly by government intervention, specifically, a time-limited monopoly called a "patent" which prevents people from developing and purchasing alternatives at a lower price.
I look forward to the computer industry's UniCorp - a single massive company that owns everything, and you "lease" the products it produces and are subject entirely to its own bylaws and contracts. Competitors? No way. And all the while, our government officials and social elite will maintain that this was "the will of the market". No, it wasn't.. this isn't capitalism, this is facism with a different name!
Rambus is being backed by 2 of the most evil companies in the world; Intel and Sony. Their plan is ingenious. Have Rambus do the dirty work so that their names aren't sullied.
What we will begin to see over the next couple of years are memory makers moving to the Rambus platform. Why bother making other forms of memory when you're paying Rambus for a "licensing agreement"? It's really a form of taxation that we the consumers will have to kick out.
And for what? Memory that doesn't perform much better than the current technology? And at 5 times the cost?
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
SDRAM wasn't even a product until 1993. Rambus patents were filed in 1990. It's all right here:
http://www.dramreview.com
Don't forget that most Rambus patents were filed in 1990 and the Jedec meetings in question occured in the "mid 90's".
Yes, there were some revisions to the patent applications (which were not approved until 1999, if you can believe that) that came after some of the JEDEC meetings. But the fundamental claims of the patents could NOT have come from the JEDEC meetings, because the patents in question were filed YEARS earlier.
Also, some of the 1990 patents cover characteristics of "plain old" SDRAM. Well, SDRAM didn't appear until 1993, which is the basis for Rambus claiming royalty rights on SDRAM, and which chronology also forms the basis for claims to BACK ROYALTIES for much of the memory production not only in the future but which has also occured back to 1993.
The fact that Hitachi and Toshiba have settled should tell you something: the Rambus case is very, very strong. Hitachi didn't face trial for 2 years, and did not face ITC action until next march.
The Rambus royalties are 1% to 2% for RDRAM, up to 5% for some other items (network controllers, for example). Everyone makes it sound like the royalties are crippling. They average 1-2% and decrease with volume, depending on the royalty agreement and stock offsets. If Dram prices go up 50%, please ask the manufacturers why a 1-2% royalty caused it.
Does anyone realize that for years (and perhaps still) Texas Instruments collected similar or larger royalties on virtually all memeory just because they held some patents on packaging silicon IC's in DIP packages ?
Royalties are not at all unusual in this business, almost all products carry either some cash royalties or some "cross licensing" royalties (in which no cash changes hand because two companies have signed mutual agreements in which each can use the other's patents royalty free).
I'm tired of reading articles trashing Rambus, making them sound greedy and Machevellian for doing something that all high-tech companies do every day. If you are a high-tech company, you ARE ALSO an IP company. It's just that Rambus is EXCLUSIVELY an IP company. But that doesn't give people a right to trash them for collecting a 1-2% royalty on technology which they developed prior to anyone else.
BTW, Rambus CEO Geoff Tate is a former AMD VP. AMD is a Rambus partner.
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SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM aren't going away anytime soon despite whatever patents Rambus claims to own. Rambus have stated that the licence fees for RDRAM technology will be lower than for SDRAM/DDR-SDRAM. However, SDRAM and DDR-SDRAM will still be much cheaper for quite some time to come because the manufacturing cost of RDRAM will always be higher than for comparable SDRAM. This is the main reason why RIMMs are so much more expensive than DIMMs - not because of the licensing costs. See this EETimes story for more information.
As I have noted in earlier, more detailed posts, like this one, this agreement is simply a classic example of the 'patent sharing' (not always entirely voluntary) that is standard practice within the Japanese patent system. I'm not saying that it is entirely innocuous -- much of the Japanese system of doing business could be framed in terms that would provoke extreme outrage from much of the Western geek community (and indeed the business community). However, I *am* saying that it is not only part of 'business as usual' today, but has been an element of the electronics industry, back before the first cheap (and shoddy) Japanese transistor radios -- i.e. all our lives! It's not a disturbing new trend, if anything, it's milder than it once was.
Yes, Rambus isn't Japanese -- but look at its list of partners (recently divided up, regrettably into separate pages for each technology)
This system has several major goals: preserving hierarchy and the Japanese business structure (which is very different than ours, with strong, almost monopolistic vertical integration, pan-industry consortia, and many intermediate layers of supernumary distributors), 'maintaining relationships' in the Japanese sense, perhaps most importantly allowing Japanese industrial development in the face of foreign patents (in the early decades).
It is an expression of their culture, which retains very significant feudal elements. It would be disruptive and disrespectful to expect them to instantly adopt *our* values, as if we had some intrinsic superiority. If they even attempted this, to a greater degree than MITI already does, it could massively disrupt their economy and society (e.g. the supernumary distributors are a major part of the economy and cannot be eliminated easily; also, their approach to lifetime career and company affiliation could not be more alien to Silicon valley, where even founders like Steven Jobs leave, compete, return, etc.)
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I see allot of posts decrying the evils of Rambus and/or its parent companies.
This is silly. The companies are not evil for working within the framework of the law to protect their profits.
The patent system, on the other hand, is evil, if one defines evil to be that which is harmful to progress and the public good.
There are only so many ways to interface memory with data. There are only so many ways to synch memory timing. Each patent provides an entity with what, in terms of computing, amounts to an eternal monopoly. Eternal, because 20 years from the filing date is an eternity in terms of how fast the technology moves. Or, at least, has until now.
I do not think it will be long before every useful method for interfacing one computing component with another, be it memory, mass storage, or what have you, will be patented by someone. Probably several someones, quite likely with conflicting patent claims. What then? No competition, as each entity will have a government enforced monopoly in its domain, which it may cross license to a competitor in the same way Rambus does - at a higher price to make the competitor's (possibly more popular or superior) product less competetive.
Without competition there will be no incentive to innovate.
With less innovation technological progress will be slowed, quite possibly to a crawl.
Then, of course, the patent advocates will proclaim that 20 years from the date of filing is a perfectly reasonable amount of time for a patent, as the technology is still in use 20 years later.
Of course, they neglect to point out that the reason the technology is still in use 20 years later is because progress has been stifled for so long by the very system of patents they advocate.
There is a reason the planes we fly in have 50 year old designs, despite advances in materials and aeronotical sciences. (Only now are some experimental craft finally using comosites and making real progress again -- many of the patents have expired!) There is a reason we are all driving filthy petroleum burning cars despite having had the technology for clean hydrogen burning motors for over forty years. (The oil companies bought up the patents and buried them - only now are a few buses finally burning hydrogen fuel and filling the air with water vapor instead of carcinogens - the patents are expiring.) Now we will begin seeing this same, slow crawl of technology coming to the area of computer science as well - the patent mongers have discovered us, and are locking up all of our ideas.
These areas of research are all characerized by an initial explosion of new technology followed by glacial progress. Not because people are unimaginative, or because all the possiblities have been explored, all the discoveries made. No. It is because all of the fundamental ideas are locked away, privatized into someones property, and further research is thereby severely stifled. Now we have the agonizing displeasure of seeing it happen to our field of endeavor as well.
Patents are bad for software. That much is obvious to nearly everyone here. What is less obvious, and far more insidious, is that patents are bad for hardware as well. In fact, patents are bad for every realm of scientific and technological endeavor: they lock down ideas, lock people out possibilities they might otherwise have explored (and that might have otherwise led to even greater discoveries), they stifle innovation and yes, even economic incentive. One guy gets a monopoly and maybe even gets rich, two or three others with the same idea (and maybe even a better implementation of it) are locked out, and a hundred others are prevented from making their contribution at all.
How much science, how much progress, has been lost to this despicable system? How much better could our lives have been, if only our thoughts and ideas hadn't been treated like land claims in a bad western?
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