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Rambus Files Antitrust Suit Against Memory Makers
bender647 writes "Forbes reports: 'Chip designer Rambus sued several major computer memory makers Wednesday, claiming they illegally conspired to limit production and raise prices in an effort to block widespread adoption of Rambus' technology.' Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties."
Worse yet, most RAMBUS had to be installed in pairs, while all other memory systems had switched over to single stick technology, doubling the cost.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Intel was the company with the existing market clout that tried to force Rambus and their IP down everyone's throats.
I realize that in business these days it is not normal to consider how much of a scum your business partners may or may not be.
But for long term business I think it is worth review. We have to ask, in the end is the world going to be a better place because Intel and Rambus tried lock up a standards process in patents.
Folks need a longer memory then they get from playing XBOX games. These companies have histories.
Pretty much supply and demand. Here is a good explanation
for it to be an anti-trust issue, the companies would have had to have been purposefully colluding to effect the price (commonly called 'price-fixing') of the good (rambus memory). if they didn't produce large enough quantities to make rambus acceptible as a widely adopteble standard because the royalties made the technology inaccessibly priced (high royalties mean the profit margin shrinks, and can become negative...) , this is not a trust. the claims in the blurb are contradictory, and if they are the claims of rambus, then the case is trying to blame somebody else because a certain someone shot themself in the proverbial foot with excesive royalties...
No problem.
> "cheap but good enough" almost always manages to beat "expensive and technically superior."
RDRAM was "technically superior" in theory, but as far as I remember the supposed performance benefits didn't have a significant enough impact on total system performance with the then-current chipsets to justify the huge price difference.
RDRAM looked promising at first, with Intel as the primary backer, but Rambus and Intel thourougly screwed up its introduction. This is how I remember it:
1. RDRAM was hideously expensive
2. Rambus used a "submarine patent" and got the whole DRAM industry up in arms about that
3. Price/performance ratio was bad
4. Chipsets with RDRAM support were expensive and only Intel jumped on the bandwagon initially (and with rather buggy chipsets to boot)
5. As a result, DDR-SDRAM was quickly announced, and RDRAM was history
I suppose the next steps would be:
6. Realize that your product is deader than a doornail
7. Sue the hell out of every major player in the industry
8. PROFIT???
To me, this looks more like the rest of the industry protecting themselves against Rambus' predatory practices and general ineptitude to bring a promising product to market. Perhaps suing Infineon and others wasn't the most brilliant move if they wanted to make RDRAM a success?
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
They were in on the talks with the rest of the memory standards organization JEDEC. JEDEC's rules say that members must disclose all IP and licensing terms.
Rambus not only didn't do that, they pimped their own knowledge of ram and techniques to speed up ram AND applied for/lengthened patents crucial to SDRAM and DDR SDRAM. When it started to become obvious that RDRAM was simply not going to make it in the market (Intel's RDRAM chipsets could NOT compete against it's own SDRAM chipsets--i820/i840 vs 440BX), Rambus decided sue anybody and everybody who produced SDRAM and DDR SDRAM but didn't buy licenses.
Intel really didn't have anything that showed off RDRAM's abilities until they went dual channel with the P4's i850. At that time, RDRAM still cost too much and DDR SDRAM went dual channel soon after.
Don't think the high cost of RDRAM was all to blame on the manufacturers and Rambus' license either. A lot of that was in the fabrication and packaging issues. At the time Rambus came out, SDRAM ran at 100/133 MHz while Rambus was at 800 MHz--really 400 Mhz DDR. So there were OBVIOUS electrical characteristics issues that had to be taken care of at the fab and package levels to bring yields up at a time when memory manufacturers were LOSING money per part. Had RDRAM come out sooner, or come out faster at a later date, things probably would have turned out differently.
So, when's lunch?
The PIII was not a good match for RDRAM. RDRAM had a faster transfer rate but more latency than SDRAM. With the chipsets of the day (i815, Apollo Pro 133A, i440BX overclocked to 133) PC133 was faster in most benchmarks. See for yourself, Anandtech still has their article online. By the time the P4 rolled around, it was a better match for RDRAM. The i850 boards were significantly faster than the SDRAM and DDR boards of the day, but by then most people wanted nothing more to do with Rambus.
This, then, is a fairly unsurprising tactic from them. Make no mistake about it, RAMBUS has never been a RAM company. It's an intellectual property company which attempts to make money via licensing and litigation.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Uhhh, I am pretty sure that the different in expense was converting to a new technology that required more process steps, and required larger die than DRAM.
The array between SDRAM, DDR, DDR2 is nothing, only the periphery changes. For rambus, everything changes, hence the size is larger, larger size mean less die per wafer, and higher cost. The only way Rambus could have worked was if there was no alternative. There was, they lost.
Just like the RIAA, Rambus is blaming others for their own failures. The reason why Rambus (RDRAM) wasn't widely adopted was because it was an inferior product. Sure, in hypothetical and synthetic cases, RDRAM did outperform SDRAM, but in the real world, it got it's ass handed to them. (remember back in the day when Via had to fight Intel to be able to release a P3-compatible chipset using SDRAM? And how Via's low-end chipset was able to pounce Intel's expensive Rambus one and Intel eventually came to the realization that in order to compete, they would have to ditch Rambus). That combined with the expensive cost of RDRAM (even the ones maded by licensed RDRAM manufacturers like Samsung, etc.) and the disadvantage that you had to buy in pairs (talk about antitrust; "Sorry sir, you have to buy TWO copies of Windows for one to work.") or use a dummy stick which adds more cost and lackluster performance across real world appz (including games) lead to its demise. Not to mention, the abandonment by Intel which caused Rambus's stock to be cheaper than the Russian rubble (already used as toilet paper).
If anyone, they should sue themselves for bad business practices. Oh wait, the stockholders did try to sue but later dropped it.
The truth is Farmwald and Horwitz had already applied for patents at the time of the initial JEDEC meeting you discuss.
That's okay.
What comes next isn't. The two of them proposed what became the RAMBUS standard as a proposal to the working group. Still okay, but.... what these two sleezoids did next was to "neglect" to tell everybody that RAMBUS was proprietary would require royalty payments to what became RAMBUS.
So everybody accepted the standard because RAMBUS was a decent idea. After adoption...POOF! "HEY GUYS! WE HAVE A PATENT ON THIS STUFF, AND YOU'RE GONNA PAY OUT THE ASS!"
Funny how that worked.
A judge heard the story and threw RAMBUS out of court on their RAMASS.
And lets look at the trouble with RAMBUS 1) Expensive because (2) Yields were so low (3) because the technology is inherently low-yield (4) Oh, and while it delivers high bandwidth it has (5) Horrible latency.
Please just go away. The RAMBUS company wasn't a company like you might imagine. It was simply a con game that tricked everybody.
DDR 3200 today kicks RAMBUS's ass in performance and price.
And oh, we don't have to pay a ridiculous amount to use it.
Ask Intel. They basically screwed up by supporting RAMBUS. The public didn't want it.
So go away. RAMBUS never had any advantages, and had oh-so-many disadvantages.