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Preliminary Ruling Limits Scope of Rambus Patents
Tackhead writes "According to this article in Electronic News, Rambus - our favorite litiga, uh, innovators in DRAM technology - has been smacked with a preliminary ruling that limits their patent claims to RAM technologies involving a multiplex bus. The article goes on to quote a source who says that since neither SDRAM nor DDR use this technique, this ruling could lead to the invalidation of RAMBUS' patent claims on SDRAM and DDR. Of course, this is just a preliminary ruling, and it's only one court battle (out of at least three), but it looks like the Good Guys (well, at the guys whose business is based on making chips instead of suing chipmakers) just might be winning."
My understanding is that all the royalties are (retroactively) based on the patents holding up. No patents = money being returned, etc. Now if I could only remember where I read it...
I am not I
Rambus is pretty much screwed because of this. Okay, they still have a few more trials, but my guess is that they're going to lose, and obviously a lot of their investors do to (at this moment, they're down 25%).
Intel has made their intentions clear. They will not be using RDRAM for future chips and will likely not work with Rambus in the future. Intel's not real happy about the lawsuits and they're definately not happy about the price gouging by Rambus. It hurts Intel's business to have to rely on RDRAM. The memory is so expensive, people don't want to use the motherboards.
Rambus has about the worst PR of any tech company because of the suits and because of the prices. Personally, I doubt they'll recover. They've really put themselves into a bad spot and I don't think they can dig out, but that's just MHO.
Does this *REALLY* deserve a 4? I mean, come on moderators! Now a days, almost every Slashdot article starts out with a 4 or 5 moderated "Funny" post, which often aren't that funny. Yet, somehow, extremely important posts that are full of information that is actually *applicable* to the Slashdot article never get moderated up at all!!
I like funny stuff like the next guy, but I don't come here because this is a humour site. I come here because this site offers interesting intellectual discussions about topics that are applicable to me today. Somehow, I just don't think the moderators get that, and it's only getting worse as time goes on.
The humour posts SHOULD be moderated up, but ABSOLUTELY NOT at the expensive of the other more serious posts that actually pertain to the discussion.
How much do you want to bet this post never gets moderated above a 1 or gets marked as flame bait?
Ever hear of sarcasm? Its quite an old feature.. Btw, look at your karma, and you'll see the troll.
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
Their stock declined 26% today.
Hehe. Ouch.
sig fault
While I agree with what you say, let's not forget the opportunity costs. I'm sure 5 million dollars in research could be used more effectively (and profitably) in suing companies for patent and copyright infringements, no matter how ridiculous the arguments may seem. Both R&D and lawsuits have risk factors on whether or not the company can profit from such actions. I'm guessing it costs less to sue over patent/copyright infringement, than to R&D a whole new technology from the ground up. (Which it seems Rambus would have to do to fix their current situation).
On the trivial part:
Why can't the patent reviewer call ??SU, with a which has a department that is well known for the technology that the patent covers. The reviewer ask to speak to a professor in that department. He ask the professor how (s)he would solve a problem covered by the patent. If the professor can describe within a ten-minute cold call the method covered by the patent, then it is trivial.
I think this would kill most of the high tech patents being given out today, because the patents only describe the obvious way to do something with a computer. (ie, it's patentable just because it is done by a computer seems to be acceptable by the USPTO)
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Furtermore, a RAM upgrade does not mean that you are forced to use RDRAM. It just means a RAM upgrade vs. a processor upgrade. Your confusing your statement.
PS. aren't per processor license scheme's frighteningly evil? <shudder>
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
-- kwashiorkor --
Leaps in Logic
should not be confused with
Jumping to Conclusions.
His link is invalid. I suppose its the dynamic servers over at Bloomberg. You will see an article there that says there was NO ruling yesterday. The ElectronicNews was WRONG.
Burn Hollywood Burn
The clear inference is that the order has been leaked, and the leak is reasonably accurate.
The way I userstand the situation, Rambus did closer to #2 than #1. The group they joined with other RAM makers said that you couldn't patent the things the group decided on and that you couldn't suggest a standard patented by your company. The reason for these rules are obvious. Rambus went to the conference and either suggested, or allowed another party to suggest, standards that Rambus had a patent *pending* on. Since the patent was pending, when anyone from the group did a check on the standards, nothing came up. Then all of the sudden, after everyone starts implementing the decisions made by the group, poof, Rambus has a patent on it. It's definately one of the scummiest business deals I've seen.
-B
"The Chip Connection Specialists. We Never Stop Innovating." -- Rambus.com
"Microsoft strives to produce innovative products..." -- Microsoft.com
For people learning english, they might think the word "innovation" means "to stick a honkin' corporate phallus up the customer's ass".
It seems Bloombergs servers make it difficult to link directly to the article, and this info is pseudo redundant since I got it from an AC below, who isn't being modded up.
Burn Hollywood Burn
"One might be tricked into believing a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents, when in reality, it only means that a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents."
You are saying the same thing twice and saying they are different. In the first part of that sentence, you say:
a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents
And then you say, in the same sentence:
a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents
So, if we make
X = "a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents"
and
Y = "a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents"
Then obviously X = Y, but you are saying X != Y ???
'Psuedo program to illustate my point
If (X == Y) {
C = X
}
So, we could say "One might be tricked into believing [%= C %], when in reality, it only means that [%= C %].
WTF??
Actually, the price of RAM in general has taken a major nosedive lately.
:-)
I can now get 128 MB DDR-SDRAM DIMM's for under US$80! =:-0 And it appears that the RDRAM makers have a clue, too: 128 MB PC-800 RIMM's now sell for under US$150. (Thud)
Maybe the competition from DDR-SDRAM has finally forced the price of RIMM's down for a change.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
About the same thing that happened to the other .com shareholders ;-)
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How much do you want to bet this post never gets moderated above a 1 or gets marked as flame bait?
Yet another example of the stupidity of most moderators. Offtopic, yet. Flamebait, possibly. This post is most certainly NOT a troll.
I hope this one comes up in metamod
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
He-he, they aren't THAT desperate I guess. Unless some of them are Russians, eh? ;-)
can be found here. BTW, their stock was down almost $12 USD the last time I checked. I guess that RAMBUS losing is a bad thing for their market cap...
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
As to pricing and bundling, why would we WANT DDR2100 bundled with an Athlon? Most people who are willing to pop enough for a brand new Athlon or P4 and RAM don't WANT to get it bundled. They want the most flexibility in choosing all of their parts to make sure they get the best possible. Honestly you sound like a Microsoft marketing guy - remember getting it bundled is always better! Now that may be a matter of opinion but I happen to be a highly opinionated individual and I personally think bundling can bite my big white monkey. But I digress. I'm responding to your facts, not railing M$. I'll have to do that another day.
Yes, this is real performance on real motherboards and yes someone finally did design a decent controller with enough power. The latency problem is still there though. AFAIK they are doing interleave to somewhat sidestep the problem, which actually isn't too bad of a solution. However remember it took them QUITE a long time to make that decent controller and the incomplete versions were released to the market with large flaws. Intel isn't the only company to ever have done that but my point is that they DID do it, and deserve to be berated for it just as much or little as any other company. We personally have about 500 brand new cp's at the company I work for, all with RDRAM. The controllers on these boards were so bad that we eventually ended up having to replace all the boards to get then to run correctly. Once they were running, they've run fairly reliably (aside from other hardware problems not associated with Intel or Rambus). But be that as it may I still don't really like them. My system at home is only slightly clock speed faster than these but it would whoop the pc's at work any day, even with simple old PC-133 SDRAM. I'm not saying this as official benchmark stuff, simply that I'm not satisfied with RDRAM so far.
And as to the subject of cooling, yes people strab mammoth heat sinks to their processors. It's become somewhat of a sport for the daring/rich. However cooling RAM is an entirely different issue. For one thing, RDRAM runs so hot just clocked normally that it has to go into different sleep states to avoid basiclaly melting itself. This is a big part of what's behind the large latency associated with RDRAM. And since they're running so hot already, this seriously inhibits your ability to overclock your bus (the only way to overclock a P4 anyway). Cooling your RAM is very difficult even if you did want to do it because most of it is mounted perpendicular to the board, as opposed to the CPU that is now mounted parallel. And when the cpu's WERE mounted perpendicular, there had to be a large amount of clear space around it to fit the heat sink/fan, space that really couldn't be used for much else. You could blow a fan on the mem, but this defintely isn't the most efficient way. So they left in the sleep modes and the overclocking is limited...in other words the heat problem really does remain, just not really in a form you and I deal with.
I hope this was an acceptable response to your facts as you posted them. I sincerely enjoyed the intellectual discussion.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
If only i had the points to mod this "Funny"
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
Now Fool keeps the boards civil, at least as far as language goes, but not Raging Bull.
If you're the type who likes to throw gasoline onto a fire, here's a bonfire just waiting for you to back up the fuel tanker.
Edith Keeler Must Die
ThTe problem is precisely the whole triviality clause.
I think it's about time we banned patenting of things which are necessary by definition in inventions. Like flammable liquids in combustion engines. To be patentable it should be necessary by innovation not by definition of the task it performs.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I believe it's mentioned in Revelation along with when the sun will become blood red and dogs and cats playing together. But imho this is a LONG time in coming. I'm really even surprised that the judge based a ruling on such a technical issue - it shows you that there really ARE judges out there willing to wade through the technical stuff and issue judgements (or at least injunctions) on it. Now as to whether or not this will continue, we'll see. I just pray to god it will!
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
Yup. RDRAM is pretty clearly a Rambus innovation, and I don't begrudge them their royalties on RDRAM sales.
There's nothing intrinsically evil about saying "we invent things and license the tech to people who want to build them". It's only when Rambus said "Oh yeah, all your RAM are belong to us!" that I think they crossed the line from being innovators into being litigators.
If you invent something, you can license it. My beef with Rambus is that I don't believe they had anything to do with the "invention" of SDRAM or DDR, and that they therefore have no legitimate claim to royalties on those products.
If Rambus makes a fortune because Intel ships a CPU/chipset combo that turns the performance potential of RDRAM into real-world advantages, and their technology gains marketshare from DDR, more power to 'em.
But if the world goes with DDR instead of RDRAM, then Rambus (IMHO) should either come up with something better than DDR and patent it, or stick a fork in itself, 'cuz it's done.
In this case, I am wondering what RAMBUS is thinking.. Why are they doing this? Are they truly just a bunch of jerks? Why do they feel that they have rights to some of this technology? I mean, certainly someone there thinks they have a case. The more I read /., the more I think that all these companies are evil demons trying to take away my liberties and other people's hard work. Is this truly an accurate assessment? Surely someone can speak for RAMBUS to explain why they think that they are in the right on this matter.
The DDR patent still may hold water, as IIRC it was specific concerning the placement of a register in the memory. I think the JEDEC/RICO prospects are interesting, considering conflicting information coming out.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Problem is that it didn't limit the SCOPE of any patent. It merely said that, most likely (remember its a preliminary ruling), RAMBUS's patent doesn't even apply in the case of SDRAM. No "limiting of scope" and no invalidation of any part of the patent, just a Judge being safe and agreeing with an "expert" that RAMBUS has no patent on SDRAM.
Burn Hollywood Burn
it doesn't quite shut down the Rambus litigation machine. Besides the totally bogus stuff, they do have a patent on variable CAS latency in the DRAM. One could argue that this was obvious, since everyone and her sister was using controller-side variable CAS latency from 'way back when. Regardless, they have the patent and it does seem to bear directly on SDRAM and DDR.
DDR II, on the other hand, has had it designed out. Dang.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Do consumers want or need a P4 with RDRAM? Will AMD continue to take market share, thereby boosting DDR sales? Will RDRAM prices come down? Will DDR chipsets finally ship in volume? And which technology really works better?
Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion!!
Having 10 patents myself, I know a little about this business.
"There goes their patent" is actually a better phrasing of it. You can patent anything unique you invent - the trick is to patent something valuable - e.g. something the market actually wants.
RAMBUS went on this strategy of suing SDRAM makers because their own technology turned out to be inferior, offering massively higher price with no matching performance gain.
If RAMBUS is unable to enforce their patent against SDRAM, then the patent is - from a business standpoint - worthless. All it could be used for is preventing unauthorized copies of RAMBUS memory, which most customers don't want anyway.
From cnbc.com:
Price: 25.21 (-28.68%) 1:34pm ET
Range: 25.0 - 35.73
Vol : 14,973,400
P/E : 86.931
Me thinks rambus is due to die... a P/E that high is laughable in light of possible loss of main source of revenue. =)
This story has been denied as patently false by all players involved. Please see this post and the Bloomberg article here. I am posting this specifically because the above post is languishing at 0 while 10,000 idiots are either celebrating or frothing and foaming about a news story which isn't even true.
Thanks, cunts!
Love,
Slashfucker
Gee, looks like somebody doesn't want
New moderators are assigned daily. With their 5 fresh new shiny mod points showing up next to every single post, the urge to spend them outweighs common sense. The same thing happened to me. If you do not use them soon they dissapear and you become a Normal User (tm) again. What happens is that the first three or four posts with +2 karma show up first, and are the first to get the mod points. It does not matter in the slightest what the content is.
Considering that DDR is faster and cheaper than Rambus, there is really no competition. It's just a matter of availability.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Herr Pabst and all the other little bedroom reviewers are also reluctant to admit their mistake. It's almost funny to see the P4/Rambus with double the memory performance in every test they perform, yet somehow they never mention those articles they all wrote months before about the shitful performance of Rambus in the real world and the imminent death of RMBS. Still, what do you expect from a bunch of schoolkids whose idea of measuring motherboard stability is to count capacitors. I suppose they think an ENIAC is faster than an Athlon too, after all, look at all those valves!
/. readers content to let the /. editors think for them
It's not even very expensive any more - compare the price of Rambus and DDR2100 memory. Do you get DDR2100 memory bundled with a rev.C Athlon? No - but you do get Rambus with a Pentium 4. Yet do we even see much response to these facts when I post them? No, just lots of red-faced
This is real world performance, on real motherboards, running real tests. I guess somehow someone did design a decent controller, and provided enough power, and overcame the latency problem. Extreme coolers? Just take a look at what people are strapping to their CPUs these days. Herr Pabst even awards first place to the biggest of the lot, the Swiftech MC462 in the latest test. That's no obstacle in a modern machine.
It looks like your sig is true, at least as far as you are concerned.
The whole existence of RAMBUS is 'bogus.' They lie, cheat and steal better than most, with every drop of revenue undeserved. They are so good at it, they even victimized Intel and all the OEMs who have to contractually sell RAM-CRUD memory. Meanwhile, while this guy reams Micron, I can go buy a 256MB ECC CL=2 PC133 DIMM for 90 bucks from them. I love them. You can barely find a 256MB RIMM - and you will always pay over $350 for it, and it sucks. The good thing is now the OEMs are using ServerWorks wherever they can to screw Intel and RAMBUS, and to give the customer more memory for the money. (Even though they still enjoy a good raping, we get cheap memory.)
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Just a few week's ago - whether due to the greed that got them into this mess, or the pride of not being able to admit a mistake, or whatever.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
A valid point?
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The reason why Rambus has to win this lawsuit is plainly for survival. If you look at Rambus' latest quarterly financial report at http://biz.yahoo.com/e/l/r/rmbs.html , you'll find that royalties constotuted 77.3% of thir revenues in the quarter ended Dec 31. Without these royalties, Rambus' would be pulling in just a little over 1/5th of their current revenues. That would make Rambus the stock hugely overvalued even at current prices. If you belive Rambus is going to lose the lawsuit, it's probably still not too late to short the stock :)
>Am I the only one to notice that no one even >tries to defend Rambus on a technological basis >anymore
Maybe its because the people who actually know about the various memory technologies are tired on explaning over and over the exact same thing to people who probably have no clue what they are talking about, but read somewhere that "insert product here" sucks and therefore is bad.
DRDRAM has significant advantages over SDR SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, DDR-II SDRAM and are roughly the same power. Anyone saying otherwise either hasn't looked at the issues or doesn't know what they are talking about(This included a lot of the hardware review sites, but what do you expect when you get your technical information from a Jr High school student.)
RDRAM - PC600, 16 bit
SDRAM - PC133, 64 bit
600 x 16 = 9600
133 x 64 = 8152
Now imagine DDR SDRAM, which is almost twice as fast since it reads and writes at the same time. RDRAM is just not worth it.
Why does this rumor keep going around. If you look at the actual data sheets for DRDRAM AND DDR SDRAM you find that they both have roughly the same power consumption. Just take a look at Samsung's data sheets.
Think before you spew.
Ceci n'est pas un sig
And you know all this because:
A: you read it on some hardware site?
B: you read it on usenet?
C: you are the urban legend spambot?
First of all the power of DRDRAM is roughly the same as DDR DRAM, in fact, depending of the configurations DRDRAM can generate less heat. Go read data sheet and stop reading usenet and hardware review sites. It is true that an individual chip on a rambus channel can get hot, but the other chips will be generating almost no heat. The heat spreader is there to spread heat and keep all the chips at a roughly even temperature.
As far as latency is concerned, the benchmarks on latency with PC chipsets show that depending on the chipset DRDRAM is better or worth than CL2 SDR SDRAM. So again there is no real fact behind the supposed higher latencies of DRDRAM. The overall differences in latencies are once again well overblown, with the highest variable in latency of a system being the chipset.
So just rename your technology something else and call it revolutionary...
Worked for MS
Slashdot Hypocrisy at work?
The real juice in the story wasn't the headline, it was the allowance of the possibility of fraud charges against prominent Rambusteers. If a fraud prosecution were to take place Rambus would completely collapse.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Most moderators would agree, probably nobody modded it past 3, but if a few people with mod pages load the page at once they'll see a funny post at 2, so two or three independantly decide to mod it up. When they all do, they find it's at 5.
Moderation is destined to be a little inaccurate when there's a delay involved like that.
And that's despite all the moderators who read at 2+, Highest First. All they ever see is the high-rated posts.
IMHO having moderator points should put you into 0+, nested.
I wouldn't force 'oldest first', but if anyone moded something 'redundant' while reading in 'newest first' I'd slap them with a tuna.
When I read the ./ headline and article, my first thought was, "there goes their patent". Then I read the article and reread the headline and it made more sense. Rambus patent hasn't been touched, the Judge has merely sided with an "expert witness" in saying that Rambus's patent doesn't even apply to SDRAM, since SDRAM doesn't use the technology in the patent.
Burn Hollywood Burn
If you're in the business where you're licensing something like that you're going to buy more than 512MB of RAM. 2 CPU P3 server vendors recommend 2-4GB, that's $4000 (CDN $) in RAM. In a 4 or 8-way server you're going to want a lot more.
The prices don't work for RDRAM for *most* things. If you're looking for a fast single CPU to do little except stream data, RDRAM is faster. But if you're worried about latency which is the real issue in any non-contrived server example, then RDRAM doesn't cut it anyways. The extra cost just makes it worse.
If RAMBUS actually offered performance benefits in those areas, it might justify the price.
But, if you really care about performance, you don't use x86 and you don't run NT. Sun, SGI, Compaq (Alpha), and IBM are in business for a reason...
... sanity entering the US court system? isn't that one of the signs of the end of the world?
"I don't need a compass to tell me which way the wind shines." - Mr. Furious, Mystery Men
Well, even if RAMBUS loses this case altogether, there is still the competition between DDR and RDRAM. Who will win this battle is completely unknown.
Do consumers want or need a P4 with RDRAM? Will AMD continue to take market share, thereby boosting DDR sales? Will RDRAM prices come down? Will DDR chipsets finally ship in volume? And which technology really works better?
This battle is far from settled even when excluding the court case. Intel IS going to ship DDR product with the P4, but at a later date, conceiveably after RDRAM is reaching mass acceptance. They are keeping the door open, though. RAMBUS isn't going away soon, if ever.
Let's hope this sets a precedent. After all, this "Let's patent this innovative way of shopping and go after everybody that uses a remotely similar method" is getting way out of hand. RAMBUS, Amazon and the like, get a life! Focus on making money by innovating, not patenting and suing innocent bystanders... This RAMBUS trial is moronic, but it still doesn't compare to Caldera buying DR-DOS and suing Microsoft... My favorite quote on that one: "Caldera bought a ticket to sue Microsoft". Sure pal, just stand in line like everybody else, and wait for your turn... --- "Good, bad... I'm the one with the gun!"
Burn baby Burn!
Probably not. Micron, for instance, never paid Rambus a cent - that's why they're part of another lawsuit ;-)
If you signed a contract with Rambus that said "we'll pay you a royalty on our SDRAM sales between $NOW and $LATER", well, uh, you signed the contract. Tough.
Of course, if you signed such a contract, and Rambus' patents turn out to be invalid, odds are you're gonna drive a harder bargain when the contract expires.
(I suppose that if a judge rules that Rambus knew its patents were invalid at the time it wrote the contract, it may invalidate the contract altogether - but that would require proof of fraudulent intent, which is a much harder thing to prove than anything that's been seen up to this point. Personally, I think there'd be reasonable doubt - Rambus' goons wouldn't have gone on the path of attempting to license DDR and SDRAM unless they had reason to believe they could get away with it. Even if the patents are invalidated, given what's been made public so far, I think Rambus can still credibly claim that they thought their DDR/SDRAM land grab would stand up in court.)
Just the Fact's pleaseu ot e99_news.ht&s=AOrD1LBRvUmFtYnVz
This was FUD
Here's the link:
http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?T=marketsq
Quote:
Rambus Shares Fall After Web Site's Report on Patent Trial
By John Stebbins
Los Altos, California, March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Rambus Inc. shares fell as much as 28 percent after a computer-news Web site, citing unnamed industry sources, reported that a U.S. judge had limited the memory-chip maker's patent-infringement lawsuit against Germany's Infineon Technologies AG.
Rambus Chief Financial Officer Gary Harmon said no official ruling had been made, although one might come out later today. Infineon attorney Robert Tyler, of the Richmond law firm McGuireWoods LLP, agreed.
ElectronicNews Online, published by Reed Elsevier Inc.'s Cahners Business Information division, said U.S. District Judge Robert Joyce issued his ruling yesterday in Richmond, Virginia.
``The fact is, no order was issued yesterday,'' Tyler said. ``We have been hearing that something would be coming out soon, probably today. I don't know what sources Cahners is citing.''
Rambus shares plunged $8.47 to $26.88 in midday trading after dropping as low as $25.60.
Am I missing something here? Why did Hitachi sign licensing agreements with RAMBUS? I thought they were fighting RAMBUS and with this favorable finding, I'd think they definately wouldn't sign. With most of the companies signing with RAMBUS, what's the guarantee any of the ones fighting RAMBUS will stick with it long enough to come to a proper resolution instead of signing these licensing agreements?
Khyron
From the article...
If individuals are convicted of fraud, it could mean more than a financial slap on the wrist, sources said.
"This means that people could go to jail. That's what this means," the source said.
And they should be thrown in jail. RAMBUS obviously committed fraud by going into the JEDEC standards meeting knowing that that the standard reached would infringe on their patents, not notifying JEDEC that they were patent pending on technoligies that were in the standard and then modifying their patent applications to cover even more of the agreed upon standard. Hell, RAMBUS management deserves more than jailtime; they deserve to be drawn and quarterd. Maybe this (throwing RAMBUS employees and lawyers) into jail would discourage others from attempting to follow RAMBUS's litigeous lead.
Well if you'd been following the technology of RAMBUS and actually READING the reviews that you mentioned, you'd know that while RDRAM has wonderful bandwidth, it has horrible latency, heat, power, and timing problems. They've known about all of these problems since RDRAM came out and they're painfully obvious now. It may have oodles of more bandwidth than sdram BUT if the latency is bad or if you can't power it or design a decent chipset/memory controller for it, it's really worthless except possibly at the high end server market where people are willing to pay oodles of $$ for extreme bandwidth with massive cooling solutions.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
what's going to happen now with all Rambus shareholders?
Their stock is dropping because they're being sued for artificial stock inflation. That's actually two ways it's dropping. One by being sued, and secondly by the deflation.
Well, your link is not reachable right now leading me to wonder if it's not you that is trying to manipulate us, and with us the stock market...
You can call me paranoid...
If I'm remembering correctly it actually went like this:
All JEDEC members were supposed to tell of any patents involving the area under discussion ahead of time which might interfere with any standards set by the group... This was not done by Rambus in that their pending patents which we are discussing now were not disclosed (even though they were only 'pending' they still should have listed them).
On the other hand I'm betting the management/legal people within Rambus didn't even know some of their ideas had been used for some time & it's pretty shaddy that they only bother to mention this as their fledgling product RDRAM is suffering a bad introduction to the market... That is the truly shady part of the deal in my thinking...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Mar 14, 2001 --- A judge is expected to issue an official pre-trial ruling limiting the scope of Rambus Inc.'s patents in the U.S. court case against Infineon Technologies AG, according to industry sources close to the case.
Yesterday, sources told Electronic News a ruling had been made. However, no written ruling has yet been issued, but ?an order is in the making?, a court clerk said today.
Hmm, your right, no OFFICIAL ruling has been made yet
Sanchi
"They said we couldn't do it [Athlon]... but we built it, we shipped it... and we didn't have to recall it." Rich Heye
Your constant view of everything as 'Good vs. Evil' is childish, boring, unimaginative, unintelligent, and quite frankly not very in tune with reality.
I can't vouch for whether or not they changed the byline while you were typing it, but the byline at "http://www.electronicnews.com/enews/news/NewsInde x.asp" for March 14 now says "Expected Rambus Ruling Could Limit Scope Of Patents"...
It sure as hell didn't say that this morning, when I read the article and submitted the link to Slashdot.
Forces of Evil
Forces of Good
These aren't complete lists but they're enough to help yout get by. Whenever you see a story, post "Yay! (Force of good) rocks! (Force of Evil) sucks!" and you'll do fine.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Apologies to /. for posting twice in response to the same post. But if you visited the site early in the day, check your browser's cache. If you have a copy for the original article (this morning's version with the stronger by-line), you may wish to save it somewhere on your hard drive.
IMNSHO, Electronic News should do the right thing and print a retraction of the original article.
So, does this mean that Hitachi, Micron, and everyone else that perviously had to pay Rambus royalties will get their money back? It's about time this bully got its ass beat.
What would be even more insane is if they released it under a BSD license. At least with the GPL you can retain the Freedom of alterations made to the code base.
Under the BSD, someone like SUN could make their own proprietary version of Win2k, mod the hell out of it, and make it a solaris network client.
At least with the GPL, there is an incentive to keep a common code base across platforms and implementations.
Was it so insane when Sun released Star office under lGPL? No. Would it have been insane if they released it under the BSD? Hell yes. GPL is better for businesses to release under than BSD. Although for obvious reasons, the BSD license is better for code that businesses want to stea^H^H^H^Huse *cough*.
1. Go to standards commities, listen to all the sugestions, and patent them in the hope that one day the suggestions are use. (which is what RAMBUS is alleged to have done by some)
2. Go to a standards commities and suggest your recently filed patent as a standard, in the hope someone will listen and add it to the standard. (which is what MS did with CSS)
In order for standards to be accepted or even used for that matter, there NEEDS to be full disclosure and trust at the comitties. Meaning: No Patents Allowed. Really, the EU, The US, and other interested parties should sign a treaty that agrees on a uniform language to prevent patents from going into or out of a conference. That and the definition of "non-trival" when applied to a patent should mean more than "something a high school grad wouldn't understand". Sure, I don't understand RAM design, but there are those who KNOW what non-trivial is and it seems RAMBUS has patented a non-trivial technology.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I remember reading on Toms Hardware that in about a year Intel is going to release a chipset for it's PIV that does not require RAMBUS RAM.
Of course by that time RAMBUS will have become entrenched enough in the marketplace to have a foothold and with Intel backing them that is all you really need.
The solution to this problem, like many, is to not support company's that engage in these types of business practices.
However it seems entrenched in the minds of the masses, and sadly it seems the majority of IT professionals, that if Intel is not Inside, the product must be inferior. While I'm not bashing Intel, they make a good product, they would love to become the only CPU chipmakers for desktop PCs.
Always keep in mind that like anything if you allow big business to narrow your selection to one product it becomes very hard to change that. The only option then is have the gov step in and I hope you all know what kind of mess that can result
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Heh, heh -- I hope those royalty agreements are binding, so the wimps have to pay for their wimpiness even if the Rambus patent is invalidated. It'll teach'em not to be so wussy...
Damm -- I wonder how much Rambus has collected already from their patent skullduggery?
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Scott Robert Ladd
Master of Complexity
Destroyer of Order and Chaos
All about me
And of course, The Register's take on the SDRAM/DDR SDRAM.
Assuming this whole thing blows up in Rambus' face, this would end the SDRAM subsidy of RDRAM, which you can expect to see suffer an awful fate. Makes you wonder what Intel is thinking at this moment, with it's finger stuck in the door jamb.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
FWIW, I leeched the headline pretty much verbatim from the Electronic News article. (IANAL, and the Electronic News article may have overstated the case, and I may have propagated the overstatement)
Your phrasing - "most likely" their DDR/SDRAM claims will not apply - is probably the more fair take on the story.
http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?T=marketsquot e99_news.ht&s=AOrD1LBRvUmFtYnVz
It's already been confirmed (even by infineon's lawyers) that there's been ABSOLUTELY no ruling and that the EBN article is false.
This is just more emulex-ish crappola to drive Rambus down.
Hasn't anyone noticed that Micron is one of EBN's partners? They'll do anything to knock rambus down. There are no "good guys" in this business. You idiots who consider the anti-rambus companies the "good guys" are seriously misguided. They're all in this for your money. Stop making holy wars out of monetary battles.
Quote:
"In a memorandum of opinion signed Thursday, but only made available Friday morning, Judge Robert E. Payne limited the definitions of several key terms in his explanation of the legal constructions he will allow in the trial, which is scheduled to begin Tuesday."
==>Lazn
What would be even more insane is if they released [Windows] under a BSD license.
Except there's already a Windows-compatible OS under a BSD-style non-copyleft license, and Microsoft wouldn't be "innovating" anything by copying FreeBSD (BSD2 licensed) plus XFree86 (MIT licensed) plus Wine.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What does the former East Germany have to do with RAM?
Nothing to my knowledge, but I can see how you'd think that (Deutsch Democratic(sic) Republic). This is what all that alphabet soup really means:
I hope this clarifies what "DDR" means. Of course, I could be talking out of my proverbial ass.
All your hallucinogen are belong to us.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I just checked, and rambus is down to $26, with a fall of 26% as of this writing. Seems that investors saw those patent claims as a major part of the value of the company. Or else it's just the stock market being its normal, irrational self...
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.