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Documents Reveal Rambus' Patent-Enforcement Plans
spiro_killglance writes: "Electronic News Online asked the U.S. District Court of San Jose to release the Rambus Internal Memos on JEDEC. The court did so
yesterday. Get the scoop here. But in brief, it looks like
they were planning to stick it to memory manufactures all along,
and did add patent claims from information gained at JEDEC in 1992." Hmmm. Rambus, slimy business practices? Say it ain't so.
The primary issue here is not whether Rambus' patents are valid by themselves. The issue is that Rambus may have violated contractual obligations to JEDEC and its members. The JEDEC member rules specifically prohibit what Rambus allegedly did (sitting on patents while allowing them to become standards), and presumably if it's determined that Rambus violated those rules... then lots of penalties could be applied. I don't know what they might be (I don't know if they could actually invalidate the patent, or just force Rambus to pay huge settlements.)
There's no point in JEDEC having a set of rules for just this purpose if they can't be enforced. It seems that if Rambus really did violate them, they should be punished. Otherwise, standards organizations simply can't function, as long as for-profit members can get away with breaking the rules and producing tainted standards.
The other allegation, which is harder to prove, is that Rambus may actually have "stolen" ideas brought up duruing the JEDEC meetings. If that's the case, their claims on the patents may be illegitimate.
That's because Microsoft applications don't use standard ASCII for quotes in order to do their "smart quotes" feature. There's a program called the "Demoronizer" that fixes that and other damage if you want your web pages viewable outside Windoze.
I know you're trolling, but other people have bitten, so I'll correct your lies.
.5MB-4MB textures and sends them to a video card. This is only one primary read request and then a nice long stream. Both DDR-SDRAM and RDRAM shine in this area. Unfortunately, this benefit is negated by video cards with texture compression and 64MB (like all of the upcoming generation). The consumer-level chipsets used also negate many of the benefits of any technology.
RDRAM tends to be the worst for servers. The large cache on servers negates much of the benefit of high bandwidth RAM. Instead it calls for very low latency. SDR-SDRAM is lower bandwidth, but also lower latency. RDRAM and DDR-SDRAM are higher bandwidth but also higher latency.
Few real server applications involve sending fifty megabytes of static data per second, servers are called on to do dynamic data, sites like Slashdot, or CNN, or Google, where data is processed in complex ways and then presented. There's little locality of access (it's unlikely two things near each other in memory will both be wanted) so what really matters is how little time it takes for the server to fetch these isolated bits of information that it needs.
A gaming station, on the other hand, frequently loads
Low-end PC chipsets (the stuff most of us use) handle RAM a little inefficiently and most RDRAM/SDRAM comparisons are based on a consumer-level SDRAM chipset and a server-level RDRAM chipset, so they claim that the low-end chipsets deficiencies are problems with SDRAM where they're really just a problem with a consumer-level product. People are spending $400 for a GeForce 2 Pro, yet the chipsets for their motherboards cost $15 in bulk... It's like actually putting a porsche engine in a volkswagen, you might be able to make it fit but you'll realize that a porsche is much more than a fast engine.
A real server, not something on a Abit-VP6, but something on a Tyan dual or quad CPU board, would be best served by dual or quad SDR-SDRAM channels. It'd add a few hundred dollars to the price, but it'd easily outpace anything RDRAM could throw at it, with all the bandwidth needed AND the low latency of a good technology.
RDRAM only looks good on paper and a few carefully constructed (ie, outright lies) benchmarks. All the claims of Rambus are outright lies. And you can quote me on this. They're thieves, cheats, and liars. They produce no product and exist merely to patent technology invented by other people. If there's a list of people most deserving of prison, these guys and all their shareholders belong on it.
More and more patents seem to seem like the intelectuall version of "First Post"s...
Rambus joins a group develuping new technology "First Patent"...
Amazon and one click shopping "If we didn't they would have"...
The whole busness of "We patented it before you could do it" is getting silly...
It's just a good thing for Microsoft somebody didn't patent FUD or they'd be sued up to there eyeballs...
I don't actually exist.