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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."
Its makes sence really, if you look at alot of motherboards they have 4 slots for memory in channels. The "bus" is almost gone already, might as well just kill it and go point to point. Don't but 4 channels thats harder I expect they will reduce the standard boards to 2 or 3 slots! But in a point to point system they don't have to worry about match memory and the like...
James
I fried a mobo on my Rambus system a few weeks ago and quickly found out how rare these mobos still are- and how little the price of memory has dropped over the last two years.
Memory is like disk space. The general population demands quantity over speed or quality. Rambus was a technology that never really trickled down to the average desktop.
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
RAMBUS is another company that is dedicated to making its money now through lawyers. Intel thought that they could take more control of PC design my picking a patented memory structure, and RAMBUS was the perfect lackey ito accomplish this. Their contract with RAMBUS would have had RAMBUS paying Intel back once RDRAM sales exceeded a certain amount. It was a win-win for those two companies, and lose-lose for everyone else due to higher long term prices for all users, and manufacturers.
The reason for this is the RDRAM design. It takes more space on a wafer to produce, and that is why it costs more ( commission to to RAMBUS is another part, but the size difference is the key cost difference ). So memory prices would have been much higher, and Intel would have been able to squeeze AMD more due to the patented bus that RDRAM uses.
If you go back in time, it was exactly as Intel was about to force RDRAM down everyones throats, that AMD released the Athlon. Suddenly there was an alternative to Intel in performance, and by not using RDRAM, the price difference was extreme. This is the point that AMD surged ahead in market share, and while the inroads they made were overall not significant, they were enough to show that not everyone would be pushed around.
RAMBUS did come up with some interesting design innovations, but as soon as the writing on the wall was that RDRAM was dead due to lower prices with DDR, they turned into SCO by suing everyone that was making DDR, by use of info they had taken from JEDEC and adding it after the fact to pending patents from RDRAM. Another stellar example of USPTO excellence. RAMBUS is dead, but someone wants to make money from the rotting corpse. Just compare how similar the lawyers fees are for RAMBUS and SCO.
It would have been impossible for Rambus to have gained those patents in time for presentation at the JEDEC conferences. They had to have had those designs in hand with the patent process already underway to have been able to produce the patents at the conference. The only thing that Rambus did which was wrong was agree through a gentleman's handshake that they would not encumber the SDRAM design with patent issues. Mind you, it's not a legal agreement to simply agree to something like that, and at the first time they were confronted with their violation of the agreement, they took one of the two recourses afforded to them: leave the committee. The other would have been to dump their patents which would have been a dumb move seeing as how they are a pure IP company making their money off of patents.
The JEDEC members continue to rip off Rambus every day that they produce SDRAM based on Rambus designs and refuse to pay them for it.
the concept is indeed pretty cool, though you'll need some tough lil drivers that can handle incoming voltage swings while it's driving.
No you don't. You already need to drive a line that's got a charge on it from the stuff you previously drove onto it. This doesn't change that. The local end just sees the far end as being terminated by a resistor to a voltage that is either low or high, rather than being terminated by a resistor to a constant voltage.
Driving both ways simultaneously, though, is very cute.
The downside is the need to daisy-chain. That means you're driving multiple lines at 3.6 Gbps on EVERY chip, ALL THE TIME. That's a LOT of power. Even if you interrupt the daisy chain at the selected chip (and arrange things so that the quiescent states of the transmitters at both ends of an idle line match) it's still a lot of power unless you localize most of your memory access to the closest chip.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So does this mean the recent Pentium suits will be thrown out too???
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
1) Memory hotplugging exists today. It's hardly an insurmountable problem.
2) Even if it were (and didn't already exist) MRAM (Magnetic RAM) is non-volatile.
Still, I have to admit that hard drives have been "scheduled" to be replaced or obsoleted 3 or 4 times now, and every time, they have survived. They are just cheap and versatile and "fast enough", and for applications that want a high sustained transfer rate (STR), they are really quite fast. Fujitsu's latest SCSI drive can handle nearly 80MB/sec sustained for more than half of its capacity. Yo would need a hell of an expensive FLASH controller to outpace that, and FLASH technology is still hampered by a "limited number" of write operations before it dies.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
That's right, it was a collaboration of RAMBUS(T) and INTEL to monopolize the memory market. Too bad, so sad, they lost. Anybody remember IBM and their MCA plans?
Because refusing to use patented technologies would rob the public of superior technology. They are allowed to 'strive' for unpatented technologies, but they cannot outright ban them.
Case law for this is American Society of Sanitary Engineering before the FTC.
"the American Society of Sanitary Engineering ("ASSE") had refused to permit inclusion of patented technology in a standard for ballcocks, even though the patented technology in question protected against backflow at least as well as the ballcock valves that were included within the standard. The FTC charged that the refusal to permit inclusion of patented technology into a standard constituted a concerted refusal to deal and thus violated Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act."
I thought SDRAM was dead too.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!