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Hidden Consequences: Rambus And DDR SDRAM Prices
Jimmie writes: "Looks like Rambus, Inc intends to use licensing fees arising from its recent patent settlements to force the price of DDR SDRAM to be high enough that Direct RDRAM (which we know is ridiculously expensive right now) can compete.
When asked that very question, the VP of worldwide marketing at Rambus replied 'I wouldn't argue with that conclusion.'
Story at ebnews.com." Sometimes the computer industry's oldest saying seems to be "If at first you don't succeed ... squeeze out some competition."
There used to be several other types of memory under development for the next industry standard, some of which showed a great deal of promise. Two of these were ESDRAM and SLDRAM.
ESDRAM was a type of SDRAM-like memory that included a small amount of SRAM cache on each chip which lowered latency, allowed for greater utilization, and also could boost bandwidth by allowing wider buses and moderately higher speeds. Here's an ESDRAM article at Lost Circuits.
SLDRAM was, like RDRAM, a protocol based memory. Unlike Rambus, it was developed by an industry consortium, and was to be royalty free. It allowed for a faster bus, and could also be operated at a double data rate. Supposedly, in some situations it might have actually been faster than RDRAM. Here's a link to the SLDRAM Corporation.
Isn't this a monolopoly of the SDRAM market?
:)
No, it's not a monopoly, they haven't built any hotels yet.
Hammer of Truth
Rambus wasn't awarded the "804 patent" until 21 September 1999. So they didn't sit on it all that long before defending their rights.
In this case, the single point of failure rests with the USPTO- for taking 10 years to read a piece of paper and put a stamp on it. If they had done their job correctly, we would have been paying royalties to Rambus since 1990 or so. (Whether or not this is good or bad is left as an exercise for the student).
Rev Neh
... and there is no doubt, that one day he will be
where the eye of his telescope has already been
About a year ago, the US Federal Circuit (the US court with jurisdiction over patent appeals, answerable only to the US Supreme Court) decided that enforcement of a valid patent can never be an antitrust violation.
If true, then that would be truly startling, and obviously a very big win for people like Bill Gates. I don't see how such a lopsided result could ever stand up to scrutiny. Again, if true, the circuit court is looking more and more partial all the time. Witness the recent antics of the 9th circuit court in the Microsoft anti-trust trial.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
The memory cap is there because of signal problems inherent in RDRAM. Heck your supposed to use RDRAM spacers for non-filled slots jsut to limit the signal bleeding from leaving them un-spacered. I can't exactly explain the full reasons why it has so much signal bleed, but it sure seems to. They btw are serial devices as you pointed out (aka daisy chaining) & I'm betting that has something to do with it, but that's a guess.
Another note is that at least in Intel's version of inplementing dual channel Rambus they reached the same 'wire count' or close to what you have with a single channel of SDRAM (either normal or DDR as that doens't change). So obviously something else is increasing that count that we don't know of.
The price difference has alot to do with the manufacturing techniques required to make RDRAM & offsets the 'gain' from reducing the bus to 16 bit & then some. The shear cost to manufacturer even at optimal levels is huge for RDRAM (at a best case it woudl be twice normal SDRAM).
Rambus as at best a medicore technology that really we could do without, but did finally spur memory makers to come out with DDR which was adressed when they first started working on the SDRAM standard in the early 90's.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
This is, of course, factually incorrect on the part of the gentleman from Intel. Clean room reimplementations of a technology are a great way of evading copyright and trade secret laws, but they do nothing for patents - reinventing patented technology will still see you paying the patent owner, even if you can prove that you'd never heard of the patent or consulted it during the invention phase.
The only way around a patent is to design a different mechanism that has the same outcome; not so much reinventing the wheel as discarding the wheel in favour of the catipillar track. The problem with this is that in the modern era of loosely written patents, it's almost impossible, since patents usually cover enough ground to prevent alternate mechanisms, or patent the outcome itself.
Moreover, you'd probably end up with a technology different enough it wouldn't be business competitive - requiring different motherboards, etc.
It seems like you're making a false distinction between several types of competition. One is based on technical merits, another on marketing merits, and nother based on intertia, and then one based on, for lack of a better term, Spy-versus-Spy Fu.
Can you really just pick some subset of these out and call them "good competition", and pick out some other subset and call them bad?
I am reminded of my old MUD days, or even now what I've heard about Everquest or Ultima Online. You could imagine that your character is good simply because of its skill as an entity (strength, kicking ability, etc) and your skills as a meta-entity (kick first, then swing, then charge, etc). But, in the absence of artificial strictures, it doesn't work that way. You can trade items on ebay, you can team up with people in the same room (that is, in the real world) against your enemies (who don't have the advantage of being in the same real room), and so on.
Why should we call "sick your lawyers" move unfair? Isn't it a sign of overall FU in the game of competition?
The nature of competition continues to evolve, as we learn more about competition, as technology evolves (and creates new FU moves). To hearken back to the "good old days" of capitalism (hey, he kicked dirt in my eyes, cheater!) seems silly.
nick
"DDR memory, let alone QDR memory, will outperform RAMBUS to such an extent that all their billions will be wasted. -And I think that's pretty cool."
Um, no. The recent patent developments mean that RAMBUS stands to earn even more from DDR (And possibly QDR) if it becomes the standard.
For more info on Rambus' past business practices, check Tom Pabst's article on "Why We Don't Trust Rambus"
However, I am puzzled by this strategy. For one thing, despite TI's success at defending their patents on fundamental aspects of DRAM (one of many legitimate IC patents they obtained in the early days of IC manufacturing), RAMBUS must know that there is prior art that weakens their claim. While exisiting licensees would arguably tend to support (or stand idly by) as they pressed others to license their technology, cockily taking on an entire industry in this manner is just begging for a barrage of assualts on the patent itself.
I can't believe they would be so blind, even in the heady glee of being gran such ridiculously broad patents like #6,067,592 System having a synchronous memory device [May 23, 3000] and #6,049,846 Integrated circuit having memory which synchronously samples information with respect to external clock signals
In fact, I think we have a duty to use the accumulated experience of our older (and much underappreciated) readers to start picking off the more outrageous patent claims one by one.
The easier we make it for the remaining memory companies to see their options, the better for *us*
To save you some work, here's a partial list of active Rambus patents (and linked to each of the patents themselves). It's not a complete list (IANAPA), but it should save everyone some work getting started. See anything that looks familiar from "way back when"?
1. 6,075,743. Method and apparatus for sharing sense amplifiers between memory banks
2. 6,075,730. High performance cost optimized memory with delayed memory writes
3. 6,070,222. Synchronous memory device having identification register
4. 6,067,592. System having a synchronous memory device
5. 6,049,846. Integrated circuit having memory which synchronously samples information with respect to external clock signals
6. 6,044,426. Memory system having memory devices each including a programmable internal register
7. 6,038,195. Synchronous memory device having a delay time register and method of operating same
8. 6,035,369. Method and apparatus for providing a memory with write enable information
9. 6,035,365. Dual clocked synchronous memory device having a delay time register and method of operating same
10. 6,034,918. Method of operating a memory having a variable data output length and a programmable register
11. 6,032,215. Synchronous memory device utilizing two external clocks
12. 6,032,214. Method of operating a synchronous memory device having a variable data output length
13. 6,021,076. Apparatus and method for thermal regulation in memory subsystems
14. 5,995,443. Synchronous memory device
15. 5,966,731. Protocol for communication with dynamic memory
16. 5,956,284. Method and apparatus for writing to memory components
17. 5,954,804. Synchronous memory device having an internal register
18. 5,953,263. Synchronous memory device having a programmable register and method of controlling same
19. 5,940,340. Method and apparatus for writing to memory components
20. 5,928,343. Memory module having memory devices containing internal device ID registers and method of initializing same
21. 5,913,046. Protocol for communication with dynamic memory
22. 5,896,545. Transmitting memory requests for multiple block format memory operations the requests comprising count information, a mask, and a second mask
23. 5,872,996. Method and apparatus for transmitting memory requests by transmitting portions of count data in adjacent words of a packet
24. 5,844,855. Method and apparatus for writing to memory components
25. 5,748,914. Protocol for communication with dynamic memory
26. 5,748,554. Memory and method for sensing sub-groups of memory elements
27. 5,680,361. Method and apparatus for writing to memory components
28. 5,657,481. Memory device with a phase locked loop circuitry
29. 5,606,717. Memory circuitry having bus interface for receiving information in packets and access time registers
30. 5,511,024. Dynamic random access memory system
31. 5,499,385. Method for accessing and transmitting data to/from a memory in packets
32. 5,499,355. Prefetching into a cache to minimize main memory access time and cache size in a computer system
33. 5,434,817. Dynamic random access memory system
34. 5,430,676. Dynamic random access memory system
35. 5,390,308. Method and apparatus for address mapping of dynamic random access memory
Someone want to tell me why a consortium like OPEC is illegal in the US and the EU, yet we allow the patent holding cartels do exactly the same thing and call it "Intellectual Property Rights".
Because the Constitution says so? "The Congress shall have Power ... To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", US Consistitution, Artile 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
The right to charge whatever the hell you want to for a limited time for thing you invented is a _constitutionally_ granted right. Only the most ultra-liberal, anti-American, and government-loving people would argue against this.
Time for another gov't probe/crackdown.
Ah yes, the tired old Slashdot line: "The government will come and and fixe\ everything! We love the government! Let's make the government really, really, really big and really, really, really powerful and have total control over all of the Big Evil Corporations. The government does nothing but good for us! We're Slashdot so we're really liberal and we love the government to take care of us! We like to spit on the constitution on burn it because we hate individuals rights so much!" Morons.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
The big difference between this situation and the Microchannel and Firewire situations is that there are literally billions of dollars invested in SDRAM and DDR (manufacturing, R&D, sales, markting, inventory, etc.). While the industry will survive, deveolping a new technology and replacing the industry standard will take time and money.
:(
In 1993 the royalties that a memory manufacturer would be willing to pay must be far less than today, since the cost of switching technologies is much higher now.
As with the BT 'weblink patent' this is another case of waiting years until a technology is widely adopted before trying to defend any (supposed) patent violations. If these patents were known about 5+ years ago, more companies could afford to risk loosing in a court battle and/or the technologies in question may not have become as popular as they are today. After all, hidden licencing costs can't be affected by market forces.
We really do need some sort of statute of limmitations on patent violation suits. If you have to defend trademark infrigement or risk losing your trademark, why not patents? Of course, it would help if patents could be processed a bit quicker, too.
I also wonder about the chances of future open hardware standards. Since SDRAM was developed as a standard and Rambus had participated in the early standards definition (along w/ all the memory companies), companies might be a bit reluctant to work towards open standards in the future. Could Rambus have suggested use of, as an example, using both sides of the clock tick, knowing that they had a patent for it in the works?
From an IP standpoint, propriatary, closed hardware seems much safer than taking chances with the national lottery we call the US patent office
- bridgette
This isn't good for anyone, not even for Rambus. Cyclically, companies who behave like this will have a brief period (or no not so brief - look at IBM, they managed for decades) of dominance, verging on monopoly - but their nemesis will come. Rambus is quite happily shooting itself in the foot for short-term gains. *sigh*
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
Fees for RDRAM are about 2%. The Toshiba agreement has SDRAM less, but DDR is more even though it's obviously using fewer of Rambus's (disputed) patents then RDRAM. Rambus themselves (see the original article) have admitted that they are using higher DDR fees to try to coerce people to use RDRAM.
Agreed that a 3 or 4% licencing fee won't make DDR anywhere near as expensize as RDRAM, and even if they were the same cost DDR is still the higher performance solution. Still, the arrogance of Rambus feeling free to admit they are trying to subvert technical excellence with licencing fees is pretty disgusting!
Though this situation really eeks me, and I am appauled that Rambus can get away with this sort of patent ( though not knowing all the details, perhaps the patent has legal merit ), there might be a bright side.
Case 1: Rambus doesn't do an Apple and raise the price of licenses to shut out competition. SDRAM will remain the memory of choice for a while. Intel will deminish support for it ( more mishaps with i820, etc ) SDRAM begins to go the way of EDO. DDR-SDRAM is expensive because it doesn't have a wide support base. The rift in memory market-share allows RAMBUS to market RDRAM as server memory: low-volume, high price. Thus the consumer is faced with either cheap, yet antiquated memory or expensive memory. New memory technologies ( which have been trying to emerge ) do not get a chance because the rift in memory markets and chipset support will be hurting.
Case 2: Intel does as is currently projected. DDR-SDRAM becomes comparible to RDRAM in total value. RDRAM is going to win out, as far as I can tell. Intel is most likely only going to support RDRAM, so the market for DDR will be too small to really hit critical mass. I speculate that RDRAM is actually faster then DDR ( especially under heavy concurrent access, such as truely utilized AGP and SMP ). To my knowledge, DDR only ups the speed of the interface, the underlying technology is not significantely different than that of SDRAM ( much like ATA66 or SCSI 100). With this RDRAM will become mainstream, espeically as CPU's break the 1GHZ barrier ( more speculation on my part, based on the starvation of CPU on both memory latency and bandwidth. Of which RDRAM addresses BW. DDR mildly addresses latency ( wrt RDRAM ) and provides BW ( though only superficially ) ). In the medium run, cheaper RDRAM is going to help a lot of power-hungry people ( though probably not as much as it will hurt intro and intermediate-level system purchasers )
Case 3: RAMBUS blatently prohibitively prices DDR-SDRAM. Now SDRAM and RDRAM are the only real players for PCs. What happens here is that RDRAM production can really begin ramping up to critical mass quickly because there is less uncertainty about the future. Prices will drop quickly over time ( though no where near SDRAM prices ). This is exactly what Intel would want. Their low-cost Celeron systems are perfectly suited for 66MHZ SDRAM. If you're an intro system, why would you bother with high-perf memory. Previously the blur between 66 and 100 allowed people to over-clock the external celeron bus. Now there is a world of difference between celeron and their "workstation-class" systems which come at a significant premium. SDRAM will either become cheap or expensive in the medium run ( lower volume production might mean higher prices if demand is sufficiently high. A typical sinario would be over-stocking of ?SDRAM causes prices to plummet, which prompts massive volume reduction, which later causes prices to go through the roof ( where it will stay ) ). Thankfully I don't think SDRAM demand will tank, so it should stay relatively normal for a while. Now here is the good part. There will now be a massive rift between the expensive ( though significant less than today ) RDRAM and the SDRAM. Hard core gamers, most servers and many desk-tops are going to opt for RDRAM. Most value-PCs are going to opt for SDRAM, but those value-conscious hard-core people ( like myself ) are still going to have demand for something inbetween. And perhaps there is a better compromise between latency and BW in a newer technology ( I read memory technologies a while ago about multi-row caching via SRAM which seems an intelligent approach which is compatible with most interfaces )
Basically I'm saying that those who demand performance are going to benifit from the demise of DDR because it'll ultimately be cheaper for them. Those that are on a budget are going to see minimal increases in their low-end memory ( assuming things don't gyrate too wildly ). And those of us looking for an overall better solution might find solace in a new technology that fills this important niche.
In the long run, I think this has good consequences ( if you ignore the whole moral imperative of stifling competition, which we can't really effect here ). In the short run it doesn't really even affect me ( being an AMD person ). It is only the medium run that has issues ( I wonder if I can hold off purchasing another computer for 2 or 3 years ).
-Michael
-Michael
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I have noticed everyone saying that the industry will survive, but has anyone seriously looked at it? The Computing industry right now is in just as big a flux as the Internet and the Global Economy (Basically all the same now right?) If the Cost of SDRAM + RDRAM are the same then the whole industry will slow down, (have you seen RDRAM prices lately?) most manufacturers are already tooled for SDRAM and most other Memory technologies really aren't slated to be introduced for another 3-5 years It looks more like the entire computing industry could be in for another shake-up unless the DOJ can act quickly enough. (Even then the US Patent Office could shut down the industry single-handedly too)
I litigated patent infringement for a number of years until I decided to go back to tech. For reasons I really can't figure out, the vast majority of my cases involved patent defense. While I have seen some bad-news patents, and actually succeeded in invalidating a few, I can tell you that the only cases involving bullshit claims are the ones that settled quickly.
For the most part, folks really don't slam down hundreds of thousands of dollars to litigate a losing case, even to beat up on a littler guy. Once you show them that you can hurt them, they go away. Really, they do.
I did have one case that went way further than it should have gone -- and it hurt the Plaintiff more than helped him. The rest of the industry in question ended up backing the little guy, and we ended up with so strong a position that they ultimately settled by offering my client (the defendant) $100,000 and fees to agree to let the Plaintiff drop its case.
So, in the end, the system works OK. The reason there isn't much need for additional litigation is that bullshit patents are generally ignored, close patents are rarely asserted on cost/benefit, and other patents SHOULD be asserted -- that's how we resolve these kinds of disputes in the U.S.
Notice the one and only fact which is important when contemplating the fact that companies have already been accepting Rambus' claims to DDR patents: they're all Japanese companies which have knuckled under. Japanese companies operate under the Keiretsu (sp?) system, in which companies cooperate and share patented IP for small royalties, building up strategic relationships and making the companies interdependant and strategically allied. By knuckling under to Rambus right now, Toshiba et al feel that they'll end up getting better, lower, licensing terms from Rambus, and they're right...except...for the US and other non-Japanese based companies. Remember Micron, for example? They'll simply fight this in court because Americans and Europeans don't do business this way. We don't believe in Keiretsu (sp?) systems stifling competition by patenting everything and sharing it only with "preferred" partners to engender a market dominance/monopoly. We especially don't believe in such systems when they exclusively benefit foreign companies. Look for the patent to be invalidated in the US and Rambus and its early-adopter partners to get anally fucked by the lack of an American patent, making any company here able to produce DDR SDRAM and related tech at 2-3 percent cheaper margins than the Japanese and some others. After all, there's plenty of prior art here, especially by Big Blue. One thing you can definitely count on about the American patent system is, it benefits American companies over foreign ones when it comes to patent disputes. This isn't even mentioning the EU, which takes a dim view of companies trying to stifle competition by forcing competing tech to pay up or get out based on very shaky IP claims. Rambus' own admittance to this being the case, will be brought up in Court both in the US and EU and be part of their undoing.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
I'm a physicist and an algorithm designer. I know the upside of patents... if I dedicate my energy and efforts to something, I eventually reap some small percentage of the gains from my work.
I also know the downside. When I was in the University, they got 50% on profits from any patents I might have gotten in the line of sponsered research. (Of course, if it was sponsered, with the people I was working under, it wouldn't have been mine at all. Hence, no patent work there. Maybe if I get back into academia somewhere else...) Now, working in industry, I'm vulnerable to corporate lawyers' interpretations of "related research"... let me tell you, that sucks. Worse, if it was something I wanted to, say, GPL, and not part of paid work effort... I'd be fighting a legal battle over something I should rightfully have full rights to.
What I propose, for the good of the high-tech industries, the engineers, and the scientists, is this:
Patents are owned by the person who takes them out. They can be licenced and distributed by a company that contracts them for a period significantly less than the duration of the patent, but ownership reverts to the individual(s) responsible for the patent. The licencing rights are not salable except with consent of their owner(s). Patent licensing rights can be negotiated for before the research takes place, but all rights are not licensable by a blanket clause on employment, save in the case of official thinktank hires (with the current rules for thinktank employment, IE free direction clauses, partial royalty rights, etc still in effect), and exempt employment does not mean own-time work is still in the employ of the signer of paychecks.
Add to this a reform of patent office hiring and training, patent fees, and generality of patents (no vague patents should be binding, I'm sorry... likewise, patents should not be granted for general systems. I'm all for algorithm patents, engineering patents, or process patents. I'm also for unordered process patents (Do A then B, and follow C D and F, in any order), but I'm seriously discusted by system patents. They practically insure vagueness.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
Of course sometimes companies had no Patent portfolio to cross license, and were forced to pay royalties. However, being producers themselves, the patent holders couldn't charge too much; corporate 'karma' prevented it - after all if they charged predatory royalties - somebody could do the same things to them.
Rambus on the other hand produces NOTHING; they exist only as a shell firm with a PR department, a legal department, a portfolio of patents, and little else. Because they produce nothing, companies like Rambus are not subject to cross licensing, and corporate 'karma' has no effect on them. The result is that a Rambus style firm is free to gouge on their royalty demands. The only thing which limits them is the threat of a counter suits by deep pocketed memory producers with the object of invalidating the Patents.
In effect companies like Rambus have the moral stature of email spam; both are a parasitic drain on a system which tends to hamper the productive.
I think that we are only seeing the tip of the Rambus future. Because Rambus makes nothing, their 'cost of goods sold' is zero; at least Microsoft has to pay for the blank CD's that they press. Thus, minus their expenses, everything that Rambus takes in is gravy. One of the things that I expect them to do in the future is use their money to acquire additional patents to suck even more blood out of the economy.
It is no accident that both spam and productionless, patent holding companies were dreamed up by lawyers. Neither is an approach that productive people would think of.
Is there a solution to parasitic patent behavior? I think that there is. In the United States patents can only be granted to individuals, NO COMPANY HAS EVER BEEN GRANTED A PATENT ON ANYTHING. Companies obtain patents by having them assigned to them. This is typically done by means of employment contracts which force inventors to assign their patent rights to the corporation. This puts into effect the first layer of parasitic behavior. Most abuse of the patent system occurs because of the assignment process; if the law were changed so that only an INDIVIDUAL could own a patent - as well as be granted one - most of the parasitic and bad consequences of the patent system would disappear.
The fact that RDRAM has a higher latency than SDRAM will become less and less important as CPU caches increase in size - this will mean larger chunks of memory will be copied into the cache at a time, making bandwidth the bottleneck instead of the latency.
The signallig problem is called bus skew and basically has to do with synchronizing at high speed. It might sound ridiculous, but when you have signals moving across a bus at 800+MHz, pin 0 could already be sending its n+1th bit when pin 15 is still waiting for bit n. This means you have to be absolutely certain your timing is perfect, because adding circuits to fix these problems will only slow things down again (defeating the point of a high speed bus.) This is something SDRAM will run into sooner or later as well though and the problem is much worse with 64 pins.
The yields are currently very bad because you have to assemble a RIMM entirely before you can test them. This means that if you have 1 chip that doesn't work, you can throw away the entire RIMM. Some calculating shows that in a situation like that, 90% yields in chips will only mean about 50% yield in RIMMs. This is probably just a matter of time though, before someone figures out a way to test them without assembling the entire RIMM first.
In the long run, I think Rambus could have a really interesting technology, but the way they try to force it onto everybody and demanding licensing fees and royalties, it will be hard to convince people... The company sucks and will probably drag down the technology with it.
Maybe we should ask the Democratic party (and socialists of all stripes) why they think the federal government is smart enough to micromanage the economy?
What frightens me is that you think the government should be MORE intrusive into the free market. You couch your arguments into "pro-competition" terms, but when government steps in and starts picking winners and losers (i.e., anti-trust law), that is not pro-competition.
I will agree, however, that some of the laws being passed are not particularly good for consumers, more government intervention is not the answer. Government is a blunt instrument, and should only be used in the most extreme cases (and Microsoft is really pretty borderline). Microsoft is a piker compared to how powerful Standard Oil was.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Anti-trust law is not cherry picking. Even Friedrich Hayek supported
legal restrictions on monopolies. Read some basic economics before
saying that anti-trust law is anti-competition.
Fist, and foremost. Moderation has nothing to do with agreeing with content. I therefore disaree with your supposition that I ( or comments like mine ) should not have been moderated so highly. The goal is to weed through uninteresting, or flaming remarks. If someone like myself is erroneous in my comments and it is highly marked, then someone like yourself will be able to pay attention to it and make your rebuttle. Those that see my comment will at least be given the chance to see yours as well, and all will be good. Additionaly, if I was truely incorrect, then by having someone like you find my mistake, then I would actually be given the chance to learn the err in my ways. This is called information exchange. I like this system.. It works; It has for me at least; I have been incorrect in the past about an original post or two ( meaning I would not have otherwise had the opportunity to learn ).
As a second point, I would like to thank you for not producing a flame, but instead being insightful.
With that said, I'll have to disagree with you and stick with my original comments. I do not believe that your agument holds.
First, my choice of the word speculation was not an admission of ignorance, but more a disclaimer saying that I do not have definitive evidence. Nor am I trying to prove a point based on the speculation, so it really matters little. Notice that my point was not that we're all going to be better off if RDRAM is our only choice, so long as it gets cheaper. But that, of the many ways that this situation can go, RDRAM will most likely become cheaper. Which will, in turn, help period. There is a possibility that this will backfire on RAMBUS / Intel in the creation of a nich for someone else to fulfill ( and ideally free us of memory woes ) which was the whole "shiny lining" that the article was about.
As for your comment about the "PROVEN" superiority of SDRAM. I would like to challenge you or ANYONE to verify this. I have a personal pet pieve about the word proven.. Anyone that uses it is put into a catagory in my mind; nothing in life is for certain or proven. Evidence is not proof of something, but only support of it's concept. I get tired of using the phrase, "the world was once proven to be flat because all _known_ evidence supported it".
As for SDRAM and RDRAM, I read Toms Hardware, Anandtech and Sharky Extreme. Yes, there have been benchmarks that showed SDRAM in the lead, but I have ALSO seen benchmarks by them that say the opposite. I really don't feel like digging it up, you can either take my word for it, or go research it yourself. I'm sure their articles are well marked. I'd be curious to learn of your findings. Additionally, almost all their benchmarks are on single CPU configurations, which is NOT the theoretical target of RDRAM. The stated design goals of RDRAM revolve around multiple simultaneous access; something not very well supported by existing single CPU systems. Intel's Italium is completely based on massively concurrent access. AGP is theoretically bassed around this as well ( though I do not think much aside from the failed intel 740 card ( or possibly even the i810 chipset ) makes full use of the concurrent bandwidth ( by among other things masking the latency ) ). My use of the word speculation is because I have not yet seen ANY benchmarks that test this theory. Provide a fully speced out AGP and SMP configuration then directly compare SDRAM ( and DDR for that matter ) with RDRAM, then one will be able to comment for or against my claim. I speculate primarily on the theory ( which I know can not be used as a basises for an argument, but again, that wasn't my main point in the argument ). Once again, I HAVE actually seen numbers that put RDRAM based systems ahead of others ( they were topping out the scores ). Thus, if you are paying top-dollar for a system, then I believe that your best bet at the moment is an RDRAM system.
As for DDR-SDRAM, I admit ignorance on the details. I've only read pices here and there, and don't even remember if I've seen any benchmarks on it. I do however remember that it's main call-to-fame is the double-transmittion ( rising/falling-edge transmission ) which we've come to know and love for the past two or three years. The main advancement here is NOT that they've created faster memory, but that they've learned how to transmit higher frequencies over longer distances. High freq. over the length of a motherboard will introduce lots of noise, and will drain a lot of power. By taking the same signal and getting twice as much data out of it, you're essentially getting something for nothing. A true advancement in technology. I made the comparison to ATA66 which allows maximum data-transfer rates to be un-hindered, but there is NO harddrive today that I have ever heard of that can transmit 66Meg/second continuously. This is primarily for use with cache bursts. Write 2 meg to the drive quickly, so that you can allow the second device to read. It stays in the drive's cache until it can be committed to disk at a more realistic 8 Meg / second. Upping the bandwidth allows improved latency by getting info to and from the device quicker. It works best under heavily loaded situations ( moreso in SCSI than in IDE however ). Likewise, DDR-SDRAM will allow addresses and writes to be transmitted more quickly, and thereby freeing up the bus for additional operations. However, this does not say anything about the memory's ability to sequentially process it. To my knowledge, we're still dealing with plain old, old-school memory access, though in a slightly more pipelined fashion. Concurrent access is not addressed by this technology. Theoretically, the mem-controller could rearrange memory accesses to maximize locality ( as would a SCSI controller ), but this does not garuntee throughput. RDRAM's use of independent channels can ( note: this is speculation based on the theory ) allow, under most circumstances, greater bandwidth provided critical mass of concurrent access. As we've seen, this critical mass is not zero. There are obviously situations where SDRAM _has_ outperformed RDRAM. The race, however, is closer with slower CPU speeds than with faster. And in case I somehow didn't make my point strong enough, the _theory_ only take hold after a critical mass of concurrent access is achieved. RDRAM has a massive drawback in terms of latency, so it's curve starts off with a handicap. The fact that it can outperform under extremely heavy-loads "suggests" ( here's that whole using evidence to prove, or shoud I say support a case ), that the trend should continue with ever faster machines.
The theory suggests that only server-class machines ( having multiple concurrent processes ) will fully take advantage of RDRAM. This is the whole Pentium Pro argument of 32 v.s. 16 bit code. The situation back then was not well suited for 32 bit code, and they just happened to suck at 16 bit code so benchmarks could really ream the PPro. All in all, however, it was a superior architecture. The concept of RDRAM is more advanced than SDRAM ( I think this can go unquestioned ). The real question is whether the drawbacks from the more complex technology outweight the advances IN A SERVER. I highly doubt Intel will not market RDRAM for laptops or value-PCs for this very reason. I am a very theory / principle based person, so I believe that the evidence supports my case, but I can not say this with any real amount of certainty because I have not seen benchmarks that test the theory properly.
Lastly, I fully admit that my theory biases me; I am not an authority on the matter. I am reading into some benchmarks. But again, this has nothing to do with the point in my previous article.
-Michael
Just because something is "in the constitution" does not mean that is it right. Get over yourself.
He didn't say it was right. He said it was the law. And, in fact, it is and has been the law for more than 200 years.
The particular clause your are unfond of here, is no longer the law -- we had to fight a civil war to find out why it shouldn't be.
To suggest that the Constitution, as amended, does not codify American social norms in some sense is wrong-headed. If there was a sea-change in political views, the means exist to amend it. Not only hasn't this ever been proposed for Article I, Section 8 -- that issue has never been on the political scope.
Of course, the fact that the proposition is normative in America, doesn't make it right either. The principles of Patent and Copyright law certainly aren't "right" just because they are in the Constitution.
On the other hand, the fact that they have been organic law of this nation for more than 200 years is highly persuasive. "Get over yourself," while pithy, certainly does not constitute much of an argument to the contrary.
Err...
I wouldn't call what Apple did 'squeezing'. They placed a $1/port licencing fee if the manufacturer wanted to use the word 'Firewire', rather than IEEE 1394.
$1/port?
Also, Firewire is an open standard. Anyone can make one. In order to even MAKE a Microchannel device, you had to licence it from IBM.
The fact is that even if the performance of RDRAM is better than SDRAM (and it hasn't generally lived up to expectations) there are still plenty of things to not like about RDRAM such as the heat and cost issues. Infact, just about the only thing RDRAM has going for it (in a desktop machine) is the high bandwidth and that advantage is more than nullified by DDR SDRAM.
The author proves he is blindly speculating when he states "I speculate that RDRAM is actually faster then DDR ( especially under heavy concurrent access, such as truely utilized AGP and SMP ). " He even notes he is speculating! RDRAM has already proven to not outperform current SDRAM in real world tests, yet this guy says he thinks it will outperform the next generation DDR, which by definition is 2x the speed of SDRAM!
He would do better to say that it wont matter at all because by then we will all be using internet toasters...
This proves moderators don't even read the stuff they moderate, they simply go for length and amount of HTML in a comment.
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
So far Rambus's agreements only give them ~0.5-3% royalties, depending on what type of memory and which manufactuer. So even if the royalties were charged off the retail price (I don't htink this is the case.), and they got 3% royalties on everything (this is an approximate upper bound), then the increase in memory costs due to Rambus enforcing it's patents would only be ~0.03$/MB.
Presently, both RDRAM and DDRRAM are very expensive. This isn't because of rambus taking lots of royalties. It's because the products are still new, people who buy early are willing to pay extra, they haven't become comodities yet, memory manufactuers still haven't matured their manufacturing and testing to the same extend they have for SDRAM, etc..
So I'm not worried about memory prices soaring due to Rambus. I'm confident that with time prices on RDRAM and DDRRAM will come down.
128M RAM contains $0.01 silicon and $10 labor, but it can only be manufactured in a $2,000,000,000 facility.
This sounds like what Transmeta does, too -- there may be some downside to companies which design but do not build the products they design, but for the most part I see only good things from it.
Think about what the market would be like (not just in computers, in general) if the only ones who could get a patent are those who *already* had the capital to produce the result.
It may be annoying and unsportsmanlike for Rambus to swing such agreements on manufacturers, at least if those manufacturers had been led to believe otherswise, but I don't see how inventing things (which doesn't have to involve actually *building* them) can be called intellectual parisitism.
Division of labor is a good thing. The whole reason (theoretically) that we put up with patents at all is to enjoy the fruits of inventors' intellects in the form of ideas they've thought of, in exchange for not infringing upon it for a limited amount of time. Just like authors -- would you insist they self-publish?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Also, I don't think, Rambus will be able to make all DRAM manufacturers pay. The outcome of the lawsuits is anything but certain.
Now its "no one buys our RAM so we'll price-gouge SDRAM"
This is the worst case scenario of "creating a level playing field" - everyone loses but Rambus
Even if this manages to survive, all it means is that manufacturers will rush the next generation of memory without patent problems into computers. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. I seem to recall IBM tried to squeeze the industry with Microchannel and Apple tried to squeeze with Firewire. The industry will survive.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I can remember when it broke the $100/meg barrier.
I can remember when it broke the $50.meg barrier. I bought four megs of RAM.
Now that it is in the $1/meg range, I bought 128 megs
Thing about what it costs now, and will cost if Rambus succeeds. They will have their day in the spotlight, and then they will be replaced with the next technology.
If they succeed I see DDR staying in th $3-5/meg range for a while, but eventually it will have to come down to compete.
If this isn't the clearest example of anti-comptetitive practices I've seen in recent years, then maybe I'm missing the point.
No doubt the DOJ will step in 5 years from now after Rambus barely exists and we're on to some new, non sucky, memory type and say "Hey - remember when you were screwing people, well now we're going to get you."
Thanks DOJ. For nuthin'.
Intergalactics - A pretty cool strategy game in a java applet
Perhaps now bloatware companies (MS?) will have to redesign their software so that the RAM requirements are not doubled with each release.
.NET, will be like 1024 MB RAM.
Otherwise the minimum standard for Windows NT 6^H^H^H^H2001^H, ummm, I mean Windows
--
> 'I wouldn't argue with that conclusion.'
Ah, another case of patents promoting the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, eh?
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Unfortunately, if the Rambus patent portfolio is valid, they can do whatever they want with "immunity" to US antitrut laws.
About a year ago, the US Federal Circuit (the US court with jurisdiction over patent appeals, answerable only to the US Supreme Court) decided that enforcement of a valid patent can never be an antitrust violation.
The decision was Intergraph v. Intel.
This means the best way to resolve this is finding prior art; one bit of prior art has been found over at technocrat.net.
-doug
I don't think it's so clear cut that there is an anti-trust case here. Patents are *supposed* to give the owner a time-limited monopoly, so Rambus (if it sucessfully defends the patents, which it has appeared to) isn't doing anything illegal.
Dana
No. The US constitution grants you no such thing. Read what you wrote again. Congress shall have Power ... To Promote the Progress of Science...
... To Supress the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by allowing dubious claimants to extort money through litigational blackmail from inventors'.
It says _nothing_ about any right to charge what you want for what you claim to have invented. ONLY that congress shall have to power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, through permitting you exclusively to charge for your supposed invention.
The problem is that patents and copyright in the current extreme are so horribly abused that they very likely do not promote invention or the creation of art, but rather hinder it.
And, the constitution does NOT say 'The congress shall have the Power
RAMBUS must know that there is prior art that weakens their claim.
Last time around AMD and DEC complained about certain anti-competitive aspects of Intel's behaviour regarding processor patents and other IP. Intel settled and promised to be good, but now they seem to be up to their old tricks again. I can smell another antitrust suit coming.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Sounds like you are too easily confused.
If you take the view that what you believe is right, and what you do not is not, then of course the Constitution can not sway you one way or the other.
The Constitution is a consensus instrument, of course, and from that it draws both its persuasive strength and its weaknesses. If the Oracle of Right holds too small a minority view, it is true, the document will not be changed appropriately.
In your supposedly "damning" example, however, this was not the case. Eventually, the majority view did prevail. That may constitute a "might makes right" view, indeed, but such is the nature of majority rule, and of supermajority rule to amend a Constitution. We check that majority right by providing limits, as in the bill of rights, and have faith that the rest will take care of itself.
It may not be the best way, but in truth, I don't know of a better way. I, for one, think the Constitution is a deep, wondrous instrument. Whatever its historical flaws, it seems to have been self-healing over time. As between its dicta, and your undifferentiated assertions as to what is "right," I for one know which is the more persuasive.
You argue against the Constitution by quoting language that has been amended out or rendered legally obsolete. Not the strongest argument, IMHO.
Strictly speaking, this is all no longer capitalism. Capitalism is where the market forces prevail. Good, well marketed products succeed, where shoddy products don't grab the consumer heart, and so fail. Capitalism isn't such a bad thing really. It forces innovation (real innovation) and evolution. This, however is a corruption of capitalism. Law has been applied to stifle the growth aspect of the capitalist system. No longer do companies have to fight their competition for the best product, or the best angle on the product. They simply pay lawyers to 'nobble' the competition, and prevent them from competing. This nullifies the effect of market forces, as customers are no longer allowed to buy the best product from the person who finds the way to produce it at the most efficient cost. It all comes down to who has the most expensive lawyers that allows the public to buy what they think they want the public to buy. Other options become illegal (read 'unlicenced applications of patents'). Personally, I think capitalism is ok.. I think this bastardised hybrid is far from ok. A small dash of common sense and looking beyond the end of their noses and past sacrificing all for immediate gain would serve these companies in good stead. I can but keep my fingers crossed that they start to look this direction. Malk