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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."
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
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.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
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.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Actually it's more like RAMBUS has *been* dead ever since DDR / DDR2 became competitive in terms of prices.
Not just regurgitating history, though - I wonder if Intel will learn a lesson from RAMBUS's demise in regard to the new fangled transmission scheme*. RAMBUS died because it was 1) not open and 2) charged royalties. DRAM is such a low margin product that royalties will kill any possibility of your product hitting mass market (in RAMBUS's case, even with intel's backing - because none of memory manufactures liked it, so despite playing along they were really thinking of JEDEC and how to get DDR to be more popular / competitive). Intel, though, is probably doing this in a choke move for AMD, so it puts Intel at a tough decision point again: open standard = AMD can use it too, or RAMBUS version 2. That said, Intel isn't stupid, I am guessing their upcoming processors will be designed around a high memory bandwidth architecture to take advantage of it better than what competitors can. The low turnaround time (i.e. no bus turnaround!) is so sexy in a geeky way. circuit board designers are going to get soooo much headache over this though...
* the concept is indeed pretty cool, though you'll need some tough lil drivers that can handle incoming voltage swings while it's driving. The power dissipation on these I/O buffers are key, but in reality these things already exist, of course - just a bit pricy.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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.
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
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.
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.
Rambus, long an innovator in memory designs has been virtually sued to death by JEDEC members over their IP rights to the RDRAM designs.
Nice, if it were true. The reason the JEDEC members were sueing was that Rambus was writing down the other companies ideas that were brought up at the JEDEC meetings and having their patent lawyers apply for patents on those ideas the next day. The other companies were not patenting those proposals that they were putting forth at JEDEC while establishing the SDRAM standards, due to a agreement between all members that the SDRAM standard would contain no patent-encumbered technology. When other JEDEC members caught wind of this and complained, RAMBUS left JEDEC, but their patent applications on SDRAM technology continued to change to cover new aspects of the SDRAM spec after each JEDEC meeting! They had a spy (codename: Secret Squirrel) in the meetings who was forwarding the tech to them while the spec was still being determined, and when the spec was published, most of the SDRAM spec was subject to Rambus patents on tech developed by the other members.
Rambus ripped off the JEDEC members and the courts are saying that this is OK. WTF? All is fair in love, war, and business (I guess).
Read, L
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.
Actually, I think you might not be aware of the manner of Rambus' actions. First of all, they're not seeking licensing for the RDRAM designs, but for patents that are infringed upon by the DDR RAM implementation.
The reason other members of the hardware community are so upset, and the reason that Rambus has been the target of so many lawsuits, is that they were on the design commitee which decided upon the spec. for DDR in the first place, and they presented their technology to the standards working group conveniently without mentioning the fact that they owned patents on the implementation.
That's why they deserve the title of 'litigious bastards'-- because that's pretty 'bastardly' behavior.
Depends on what you mean by "RAM". FRAM and MRAM are rewriteable, random access memory technologies that are also non-volatile. Densities and price points today don't make replacing your current RAM cost effective, but give 'em a chance.
Hard drives will still be around for bulk storage. Dollars-per-bit counts, too.
decide for yourself.
The point is that you may ammend a patent application after it has been applied for and before the decision has been made. They originally filed applications on a rather generic implementation and adjusted it to fit the spec while JEDEC was still in the process of writing it.
At least that's what the other members of JEDEC alleged, and RAMBUS, rather than deny it outright, admitted that it was receiving emails (from someone calling themselves "Secret Squirrel") advising them on how to ammend their technology (and their patent applications), but that they did not know who they were from, and did not know that the information was the same as was being discussed at JEDEC.
Read, L
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
It wasn't. It had a high latency and it's bandwidth only exceeded the bandwidth of SDRAM a bit at first. Then, as DDR ramped up to speed, DDR blew it away in bandwidth and latency.
Rambus was never a great idea. It was very difficult to design a mobo with it. It is rumored that no company ever designed one without the help of Rambus the company.
To be honest, the only reason Rambus went anywhere is because Intel signed an agreement to force bundle it with P4. And this act itself launched Athlon and AMD, because Rambus was unaffordable and didn't provide levels of performance that were unreachable with regular RAM.
If Intel had applied the same level of effort to their SDRAM or DDR motherboards, they would have produced higher performance than Rambus at lower cost. But Intel didn't, they had signed an agreement not to. And they threatened to sue VIA if they brought a (presumably high performance) SDRAM chipset to market for the P4. Only once Intel shipped their own SDRAM-based P4 chipset (the 8200?) did Intel drop this threat against VIA.
RDRAM was mostly marketing. It's performance was never really all it was cracked up to be.