FTC Dismisses Complaint Against Rambus

swordboy writes "A federal judge just threw out the FTC lawsuit against Rambus. This has been discussed at length here before but this changes the landscape yet again. An interesting, possibly coincidental item is that Intel just today announced a new and very powerful DRAM interface that bypasses Rambus IP altogether."

Comments

Woo

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, the question is, does this offer the same price-point as DDR?

I mean, DDR-II has a significant price-premium over current DDR, but if it doesn't....

Woo. It might be worth going Intel for once :)

Time is of the essence

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Intel just today announced a new and very powerful DRAM interface that bypasses Rambus IP altogether.

Unfortunately, most court disputes between hi-tech companies finish long after the technologies in question are dead. Just look at Lineo/Canopy : when they won the DRDOS settlement against Microsoft, Windows 95 and DOS were already just a painful reminder of the past.

So yes, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Intel can do without the Rambus IP. However, I doubt it's the real reason, because even when the disputed technologies are obsolete when the court reaches its verdict (or the parties settle), the money from damages or settlement is very real.

Re:Time is of the essence

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Unfortunately, law and technology are completely different realms. The law realm tries its damndest to be exacting which costs expedience, and the technology realm tries its damndest to be fast.

Rambus is a proof of what SCO can do

[Anonymous Coward]

Rambus story shows that, in US, anything is possible in courts, even if you screw people, even if you do nasty things, outrageously lie, etc... at the end you may get awarded in court.

That's why making fun of SCO doesn't make me laugh much, because there is a possibility that they can get what they want in the courts.

Re:This is an important decision

[El]

Hard drives fail and are slow as hell. And are several orders of magnitude less expensive per byte stored. Unless something happens to drastically alter the relative price of hard disks vs. RAM, I predict that you're blowing smoke.

Re:Both news items are exciting

[dameron]

Rambus, long an innovator in memory designs has been virtually sued to death by JEDEC members over their IP rights to the RDRAM designs.

I can't possibly imagine how you could have followed this case and come to that conclusion unless you've had blinders on and are deep into Rambus stock. Rambus deserves the title "Litigous Bastards" almost as much as SCO.

-dameron

Re:Both news items are exciting

[CaptBubba]

I don't think the companies would be so hostile if they had know ahead of time that they would be paying Rambus royalties. I think the issue was more that Rambus slipped their patented process into the design and then, when it was too late to remove it, they told everyone to pay up. I think the manufacturers were rightfully pissed off. This is with SDRAM (and by extension DDR) tech, not RDRAM, which everyone expects Rambus to charge for.

That said I think it is unsuprizing that Intel and the manufacturers would look somewhere else for the next generation of RAM technologies. They'd be foolish to deal with a companay that had tricked them before.

Re:RAMBUS is so dead

[Best ID Ever!]

Actually it's more like RAMBUS has *been* dead ever since DDR / DDR2 became competitive in terms of prices.

I think you mean RDRAM is dead. RAMBUS, the company, is still very much alive thanks to this ruling, which allows them to extort royalties for SDRAM.

Shouldn't the subject read...

[lauterm]

Shouldn't the subject read "FTC Complaint Against Rambus Dismmissed" instead of "FTC Dismisses Complaint Against Rambus". The title as it currently reads almost made me think the FTC wasn't all that bad. Then I read the body. Oh well, back to hating the FTC.

Re:This is an important decision

[ImpTech]

Oh come on! Thats just silly. Lets take all our data and put it in *volatile* storage! You said it yourself, "a backup power system will be required". What are you gonna do, put solar panels on everybody's monitor? Battery backups for all? What happens when the battery needs to be replaced? For all the failures of harddrives, you've never seen a dataloss apocalypse like what you're proposing.

Oh, and as far as bottlenecks go, when my internet pipe can bog down my harddrive, then I'll be concerned.

Re:This is an important decision

[chunkwhite86]

Within 5 years, I predict that most machines will use RAM memory for all system storage. A backup power system will be required, but system speeds will go through the roof due to faster data access times.

Not a chance in hell. The only acceptable solid-state data storage medium is non-volatile memory i.e. "flash" memory. No one anywhere will risk all their data to any storage medium that a dead battery would wipe out. Flash storage is waaaay too slow for primary storage. Even a modern IDE hard disk is much faster. modern SCSI even faster than that, and the latest 2 Gb/s fibre-channel disk drives even faster. DEC tried selling solid state hard disks in the mid 90's. I believe they had a 512MB, 1GB and 2GB models. They were very expensive and very slow. The same is true today.

Hard drives fail and are slow as hell. They are the bottlenecks in 99% of today's systems. That will change soon, thanks in part to Intel and AMD.

Not always true. First of all, some applications are CPU bound and some are I/O bound. Folding@home is CPU bound. it doesn't give a crap what your hard disk is. 'tar' and 'dd' are i/o bound, they work better on faster disks. Some applications are equally cpu and i/o bound like video editing.

This will NOT change any time soon, nor will the disk I/O speeds of personal computers drastically change in the next five years. Yes, I am willing to bet on it.

Re:Nothing special in the drivers.

[timeOday]

I for one will pay a small premium to get 1 larger stick instead of 2 smaller ones. That way I can upgrade without chucking my original ram.

Not the end

[nezroy]

Something glossed over by the article (and Rambus), but very important, is that this isn't anything even remotely like the end of the FTC investigation into this.

"Today's ruling came after a three-month evidentiary hearing and is subject to potential further review by the full Commission and review by a United States Court of Appeal."

and

"The Judge's initial decision is subject to review by the full Commission, either on its own motion or at the request of either party."

Basically one judge threw out the preliminary suit brought by a small commitee of the FTC. The case will now almost certainly go before the full FTC and, unlike an appeals process, this will involve a complete reexamination of the body of evidence. Essentially there will be a second, independent judgement by the FTC again on this matter, with potentially (and hopefully) differing results.

Re:Conspiracy, conspiracy

[Dun Malg]

This is actually correct. I think that if the Slashdot crowd would look at ALL the facts regarding this situation, they would see that Rambus IS a victim here. Rambus made a lot of mistakes with their behavior that can not be excused, but the evidence indicates that Rambus was invited to be part of JEDEC so that their technology could be taken.

What? Everyone who's invited to participate in JEDEC is there so their technology can be "taken". Taken, that is, and put into an industry wide standard for all to use! If you're suggesting that RAMBUS reps at JEDEC didn't know that they were developing a standard at the meetings and were "tricked" into letting their as-yet-unapproved patent for memory into the standard, then you're an idiot.