Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the finally-moving-forward dept.
jandrese writes "According to Cnet, Intel is finally getting around to supporting DDR SDRAM in their P4 chipsets. This is a good move on Intel's part, as they need to bring the cost of their P4 based systems down to compete with AMD, and moving away from Rambus is a good start."
Re:Patents kill your tech off!
by
MrResistor
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The patent drove the cost of DDR RAM up so much relative to competing technologies that the tech died.
I'm hoping you meant to say RDRAM.
Anyway, the patents had nothing to do with the price differences between RDRAM and DDR SDRAM, it was all due to manufacturing costs. I remember a little over a year ago Kingston was bragging about their 30%(!) yield on PC-800 RDRAM chips. When 70+% of your product doesn't pass QA, that's definately going to drive your costs up! Additionally, manufacturers had a fair amount of retooling to do before they could make RDRAM, and high setup costs get passed on to the consumer. As I recall, RDRAM also has a bigger die size than DDR SDRAM (I could easily be wrong, it's been a while since I cared) which would also drive up costs.
In contrast, DDR SDRAM only required modifications to existing SDRAM tooling, and since the SDRAM manufacturing processes had been pretty much perfected already yield was high from the get-go.
Rambus' royalties on RDRAM were actually pretty low. I don't remember what they were, but I remember it being under 3%.
-- Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
What's wrong with the SiS?
by
diesel_jackass
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hoping you meant to say RDRAM.
Anyway, the patents had nothing to do with the price differences between RDRAM and DDR SDRAM, it was all due to manufacturing costs. I remember a little over a year ago Kingston was bragging about their 30%(!) yield on PC-800 RDRAM chips. When 70+% of your product doesn't pass QA, that's definately going to drive your costs up! Additionally, manufacturers had a fair amount of retooling to do before they could make RDRAM, and high setup costs get passed on to the consumer. As I recall, RDRAM also has a bigger die size than DDR SDRAM (I could easily be wrong, it's been a while since I cared) which would also drive up costs.
In contrast, DDR SDRAM only required modifications to existing SDRAM tooling, and since the SDRAM manufacturing processes had been pretty much perfected already yield was high from the get-go.
Rambus' royalties on RDRAM were actually pretty low. I don't remember what they were, but I remember it being under 3%.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/011008 /index.html
I thought that this chipset looked good enough.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O