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Rambus Wins Case Against Infineon
rednoise writes "Yahoo is running a story about how a Federal Circuit Court in California (I think) has (unbelievably) ruled that RAMBUS did NOT intentionally mislead members of JEDEC when the committee was developing the SDRAM specification. RAMBUS' stock skyrocketed something like 57% on the news. This is very bad news for owners of computers."
Why is RDRAM a bad thing for computer users? I think promoting better technology is a good thing for users. If people promoted the better technology instead of the cheaper one, companies couldn't dump their obsolete products on the market in order to decrease sales of the better technology. If people bought a product based on its quality, we would have things like organic LED displays instead of truly obsolete LCD screens and CRT monitors.
I don't know where to stand on the issue of who had prior art, but I have talked to people on both sides and they seem to both have valid arguments. I don't believe any of the companies involved are boyscouts. What I am interseted in is which is the better technology. Obviously, if you look at the specs of Rambus, you will see that although DDR 266 is just a lower stepping of PC133 Ram and the bus is double-pumped. Rambus, on the other hand, has a lot more going for it. Its bus has less traces and allows you to more easily have more than one channel. It is also capable of shutting off portions of itself not in use.
If you look at a Tom's Hardware article It mentions that there is a limitation with using parallel designs due to uncontrolled impedence.
Not to mention that memory benchmarks available on many sites show that DDR can't continiously maintian its bandwidth like Rambus can. Instead, its bandwidth is spurty.
Also, Rambus has many new things on the backburner.
Rambus memory has also become much cheaper. I believe in leaving the decision of whether or not
Rambus infringed on patents to the courts and going for what is the best technology so you can give it a boost. What holds back RDRAM in terms of price is that there isn't enough being sold.
Volunteer Mozilla developer, RPI Student.
Maybe if we would have slowed the pace, not tried to jump start the PC industry with clock speed wars and bus bandwidth statistics, and as an industry concentrated on elegant solutions, innovative design and bringing something truly new to the consumer the market for PCs and software would not have stagnated so brutally? It's more than obvious that the current approach failed.
The massive interest in the first wave of iMacs proves that consumers are hungry for something new, but marketing clockspeed and Apple's insane need to keep prices high killed that movement. Maybe a glimmer of hope from Small Form Factor or Mini-ITX (which I sit and type from at the moment)?
What the hell does this have to do with Rambus? Rambus is part of the brute force/clockspeed eccentric computing industry. They have zero interest in the customer or industry partners, just in money (I know, I'm a capitalist pig at heart too, but there's more to it then that). When their product doesn't sell, they sue their partners, partners gained under false pretense.
So would the industry be better off if we were just getting to 2gHz? If DDR was just taking off in the market place? If Microsoft concentrated on fixing Windows 95 instead of pushing out incremental upgrades every 18-24 months? Would processor upgrades feel really substantial if the architecture were more elegant and devs more concious of performance? If Linux devs stopped trying to emulate the Windows desktop and feature creep and tried to break away from the desktop metaphor? Would it be a better industry (and would the consumer still be interested) if Apple had 30% market share and users really had alternatives?
Yes, the market would be more fragmented and support would be more challenging. Yes, 3gHz is cool, but who needs it? Yes, XP is better than 95, but could we have gotten there in 2 upgrades instead of 5, and caught the security holes along the way. How cool would the Linux desktop be if KDE was built from the ground up not to be like Windows (flame retardent boxers activate!)?
We would certainly have fewer 800lb gorillas, and a more interesting landscape. I think so...