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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."
Ok, so thier trying to have other companies pay for thier own stupidity?
I can't imagine why any manufacturer would have done a thing like that.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
The real reason RAMBUS wasnt a success was because it was so fuggin expensive! Why pay extra money for a motherboard that supports it to pay 2x-4x the amount for the RAM as well? Nearly doubles the PC cost!
-Imidazole2
The manufacturers didn't want to pay their royalties?
Think about that for a second. 'We weren't successful because they didn't want to pay for it.'
I tried that argument down at the Ducati dealer, didn't work there either.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
Well, uhm, yeah that's probably it. Deal with it, losers. Sheesh.
They say vote with your wallet. Until you do. Then they sue your ass.
So I sue a set of companies who did not want to use a proprietary licensed technology over a open spec. I wonder if SCO's being giving them stupidity lessons.
Maybe RDRAM wasn't the success it should've been, because it was more expensive, and noone ever really adopted it?
No... no, that can't be it. We should sue!
So, RAMBUS gets a government monopoly on a given process (by shady means, or not), and then it's somehow illegal when other companies decide to use other processes instead? Yeah, that makes sense.
[
Wasn't Rambus accused of monopolistic behavior when their designs first appeared?
This smells like SCO -- if you can't compete, litigate!
1. Design a product 2. Ensure it's Overpriced 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
They blame a conspiracy to raise prices, and then they say chipmakers didn't want to pay Rambus licensing. You can't have it both ways... it's obviously your own fault if your licensing is too expensive.
There's no reason not to expect RAM makers to retaliate after what Rambus did at that technology conference.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
People didn't adopt your technology because
1) It sucked.
2) It was highly overrated.
3) It was overpriced.
4) You are a deceitful bunch of motherfuckers who nobody trusts.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
Or maybe it was because it was too expensive and better alternatives existed?
Ever consider that one, legal geniuses at Rambus?
The coolest voice ever.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
So, this it is clearly the chipmakers fault then, huh?
Rambus should learn some basic business strategy. If someone comes out with a slightly less quality product, but sells it for a lot cheaper, that product will win. So, recognize the problem and lower your prices or significantly raise the benefits of paying them. In either case, don't resort to frivilous lawsuits if things don't go your way.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
I'm sure this is a dumb question, but why does the price of RAM fluctuate? Hard drives and processors are getting continually cheaper yet I've seen memory jump up and down by almost 50% each way, and I don't see why.
The only company violating anti-trust laws was RAMBUS! Entering into a standards committe and submitting technology while secretly patenting it is not only evil, it's illegal due to antitrust law.
And the reason their RAM cost so damn much is because of their royalty arrangements which most companies refused to enter into. And at the time RAMBUS was touting the profit margins on their products over DDR as a benefit and reason that companies should sell it!
Bastards.
The rest of us believe that the existing technology delivered acceptable levels of performance for far less money.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
You don't have a God-given right to collect royalties from people who would rather use a different technology.
If by "fix prices" you mean keep prices high because that is what is necessary to make a profit because other technologies that are almost as good are far cheaper, then the companies being sued by Rambus had better watch out.
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.
Hey Rambus, there's a lesson you should have learned from your ol' pal Sony. Ask them what happened to their Betamax format.
Seriously, "cheap but good enough" almost always manages to beat "expensive and techically superior." Apple might be an exception, but that's open to debate. Too bad Rambus didn't read the history books.
did it ever enter their tiny little heads that the reason that their wunder-patent didn't sell as well as their very carefully crafted market research said it should have, might just have something to do with the fact that the CONSUMER (not the producer, they just pass the cost on) didn't want to pay their licence fee (100% price markup) for a product which provided minimal benefit in certain limited cases and a large handicap in a great many (more commonly encountered) cases?
stupid corporation, hopefully they and all the other "IP" companies will go the way of the tyrannosaurus rex (i.e. screaming in agony as a giant fireball from space lands on their heads)
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
The chip makers didn't want to pay there royalties oh darn they arent supposed to want to pay them. Rambus died because it was to expensive and it was to expensive because there were huge royalties gee shucks I guess another company with a brain dead business model. Rambus wasent good enough to compete at the prices. Yes at the time it was better but just wasent that much better.
If you want to take over a market you cant just be somewhat better it cant be a evolutionary better it needs to be revolutionary. They wernt and they had stiff compotition and bad business practices with there partners as well.
No sir I dont like it.
OK its a sign that they've reached the near death stage. Nothing left to do but pull the old pump-and-dump routine to screw a last few suckers before the end.
I wish there was a way to make the corp execs and legal teams like 10x PERSONALLY liable for this kind of bullshit behavior
Pretty much supply and demand. Here is a good explanation
Looks like they have been going to the SCO charm school. I bet SCO sues them for stealing business secrets.
The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
"We have a fiduciary obligation to our shareholders to do something about this"
Ok from now on whoever says this, gets stabbed in the throat. That phrase is hereby forbidden, under penalty of Throatgestabben.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
``This is yet another example highlighting Rambus' pattern of using litigation as its only real business model,'' said Christoph Liedtke, an Infineon So this explains where SCO got their business model from... -A
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Their argument appears to be "These companies didn't want to pay us, so they used a competiting product. So we're sueing to make up the money we didn't make from not trying to be competitive in the open market."
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...
Rambus is accusing them of colluding to fix prices. The only novell aspect of their argument is that this wasn't to reap the higher profit margins but to force the market to adopt technology preferential to the manufactures not the market. That second part. I'm not so interested in.
Because price fixing is price fixing is price fixing. If Rambus can prove it let loose a smackdown. Particularly in North America. A smackdown so brutal and draconian, the member states of the WTO collectively crap themselves (the reverberations being at 82 cents above the lowest E flat). Either you want a market with price fixing or without it. I for one like voting with my wallet, perhaps other people are not so inclined.
...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."
I can say in all honesty that I didn't buy rambus because the cost was too damn high. I strongly suspect that chipmakers didn't want to sell an overpriced product, and focused on what consumers demanded. From my understanding AMD is outselling intel, and also near as i'm aware rambus isn't even an option for AMD supporting chipsets.
I'm damn sure chip makers didn't want to pay royalities, but this is neither immoral nor illegal when there is a viable cheeper alterantive.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
In its lawsuit, Rambus cites a series of e-mails dating from 1996 in which executives at Hynix, Siemens (nyse: SI - news - people ) and Micron (nyse: MU - news - people ) discussed...
Where in hell did they get those emails from? Did they fabricate them?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Memory Maker 1: Damn this is expensive.
Memory Maker 2: And nobody is buying it.
Memory Maker 1: We're losing money on this crap.
Memory Maker 2: Let's do something else.
Memory Maker 1: Ok.
How much more conspiring can there be!?!
Not exactly. They are claiming that the chip makers deliberating conspired to make their chip FAIL because of higher prices because the chip makers weren't getting the profit margin they wanted on them.
It may very well be true, but it could easily be that all the chip makers said, Screw this we don't get the profit we want individually. The catch is that RDRAM really was much better, so the argument is none of them would have neglected it if they hadn't agreed to collectively neglect it, which is illegal.
Never confuse volume with power.
RDRAM was some pretty interesting technology, and very helpful in getting high-speed memory for things that needed it, such as game consoles and servers.
Too bad it was invented by such a nasty company with no vision.
Oddly enough the fluctuating prices on RAM mean you are overall getting a much better deal on your memory than on your processor.
Basically the constant decline in prices of processors is explained by Intel's ever declining unit costs. Intel can mark up processors by a fairly constant amount, as their costs decline due to things like R&D and factory costs being spread over a now exceedingly large number of units, those costs have declined. They can also affort to invest in the cutting edge technologies, and can hope to make money over the lifetime of the factory.
On the other hand RAM has pretty much been developed, it's just lots and lots of transistors, resistors, capacitors on the silicon. As a result it's quite easy for a new company to start a RAM manufacturing firm, lots of capital for the equipment is the only major hurdle. As a result it's one of the first places countries subsidize when they want to develop a high tech semiconductor manufacturing industry. Japan did it in the 80s, Korea and Taiwan did it in the 90s, and to a lesser extent China is doing it today. It appears that foundry services are replacing DRAM as the first semi manufacturing a country does. The idea is that if we have companies with the manufacturing experience they will facilitate the introduction of companies that add signficantly more value with an engineering process and a country can build it's own industry from the ground up.
As a result contries trying to build the industry are willing to give boatloads of cash to an entraint trying to enter the market. These firms operate at a loss for a long time, and got free capacity, so they drive down pricing for everyone else in the industry. Check on Micron's profit level vs Intel's over a long period of time to see that Intel keeps prices at a relativly stable markup over costs (use gross margin as a decent indicator of mark up they were coming to the tail end of a good year in 2001). While Micron makes money in the upswings (last one was in 1999 before the chart) and loses it hand over fist in the downturns (hopefuly making enough to allow it to invest for the next generation technology (as the next new entraint subsidized by the government will have a state of the art fab).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Oh, and "This is the world's smallest violin playing just for Rambus."
By this logic, Nintendo could sue Sony for luring gamers and developers away from the N64 to the PS1 because they didn't want to pay the costs of cartridges over CDs!
It's funny how companies turn against the supposed benefits of the free market when it stops working in their favour, isn't it?
If you design a widget that you think guarantees you a fortune, and then somebody comes up with a better and cheaper widget that everyone uses instead, then that's really tough shit on you. Innovate, not litigate.
You must think in Russian.
No problem.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
You know, I think they may be onto something...
In all seriousness, this is exactly why it flopped: people didn't want to pay exorbitant pseudo-taxes to a single vendor. Of course, they do it all the time with Microsoft, but maybe there's something different about RAM. I don't know.
Ironically, most of the posts in this story corroborate the plaintiff's charge - that manufacturers limited production to create an artificial scarcity which drove prices of Rambus memory up. You can't counter the argument that nobody adopted Rambus technology because it was too expensive when the charge is that it was collusion on the part of manufacturers to artificially drive up price and prevent widespread adoption. Talk about logically shooting yourself in the foot...
Reading the article, it sounds like memory manufacturers could have colluded against Rambus. In my book, if none of the manufacturers independently wanted to produce Rambus memory and they communicated this fact that amongst themselves, that's not collusion. The details of who said what and at what time, though, are definitely something that will be worked out over the coming years. Depending on the nature of the communications and their timing, this could in fact be determined to look like collusion. If each firm can individually show why they didn't care to produce more Rambus memory, though, I think the case will fail.
Mind you, I'm not saying that I like Rambus, their practices, or anything - just that they perhaps do have a case. Only time will tell.
I think the biggest complaint was they they developed an incompatible standard, tried to force the industry to use their standard, and then tried to force all the chip and motherboard makers to pay them royalties to use it.
This does smack of McBride and SCO, though. Develop/acquire an (arguably) inferior product, then try to extort everyone who uses it, and sue everyone else who doesn't.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Leading candidates are SCO and Rambus
They didn't buy enough licences from me! My business is failing because they conspired against me! They won't pay me what I want! Waaaaah, call my lawyer!
(Can we vote on this in the next slashdot poll, and Fed-ex the trophy to the winning company's head office?)
My rights don't need management.
Except that most people here have been denying that it was better, except in certain cases. And, in particular, they've been denying that it was better for gaming, which is were many of the rather high end $$$ go.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Who inherits the title of litiguous bastards once IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Autozone, Daimler-Chryslers, et al finish flushing the current holder of the title down the crapper.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
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?
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...
This problem was evident from day one. The fact that they didn't go through the trouble to secure independent production capacity to keep the other manufacturers honest just goes to show that they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. Doing so would have slimmed RDRAM profit margins but definitely insured that lack of supply doesn't kill their product.
It's a case of greed ruining their business model.
I'm surprised that Intel bought into this mess. Just goes to show that for all their glitz, Intel can be a bunch of geeks sometimes.
Politicus
The fact is, whether or not it is presently recognized in a court of law, just about every feels that Rambus has behaved very unethically by inserting their designs and failing to disclose they are patented and could be held liable for using these "adopted industry standards."
Now everyone who makes Rambus stuff has to pay Rambus. Great! But what if you don't want to use Rambus? Correct! Make something else! What else is there to do but go back to the drawing board and agree upon yet another new standard that is free of patent issues!
If it's illegal to do that the second time, why wasn't it illegal to do it the first time when they all banded together to agree upon a singular design standard?
In Soviet Russia, Monopolist sues YOU for anti-trust!
The fact that Rambus owns some patents does not in any way obligate memory vendors to license those patents, or to produce any particular amount of product using them. If Rambus had a contract with a particular memory vendor, and the vendor failed to meet their obligations under the contract, Rambus would have grounds to sue them for breach of contract, but this is not an antitrust issue.
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.
Read the Rambus complaint for yourself instead of just believing the regurgitated crap. http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/nsd/rmbs /custom/050504pr3_civilcomplaint.pdf
There are lots of quotes attributed to HiNicks, MyCon and Infringeon execs, that were withheld by the thieves, but were found via 3rd party discovery, courtesy the FTC, whom the infringers designated to fry Rambus. Guess what? The FTC Chief ALJ exhonerated Rambus and instead cited Rambus's "superior" technology as the reason they enjoy a monopoly. Here is the 300+ page FTC Initial Decision with numerous findings of fact that support Rambus's antitrust case, in case you are interested.
http://www.ftc.gov/os/adjpro/d9302/040223initialde cision.pdf
In the Infringeon case, a Federal appeals court overturned findings of fraud and non-infringement against Rambus. The Supreme Court agreed.
BTW, the Department of Justice has their very own antitrust case against the same parties that Rambus is up against, for price-fixing.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
I believe that too, along with numerous other reasons (such as the fact that the price/perf/quality ratios were really pathetic). It still doesn't mean anyone did anything illegal.
The business plan for many modern companies apparently goes something like this:
2. Whine, bitch, and sue because people aren't buying it.
3. Profit!
Sounds like the Rambus execs should have all failed basic economics.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
....reminds me a lot of ISA vs MCA during the late 80s/early 90s. The MCA was better, but a pain to licence from IBM. What happened? The industry came together, made EISA. Except IBM had more brains than to sue over it.
I read the benchmarks for Rambus. The performance gains were noticable, but not stunning. They fell for nothing other than the chicken and egg problem. Since RAM producers didn't believe in Rambus on the mass market, there was no cheap mass production. Since there was no cheap mass production, it failed on the mass market. Self-fulfilling prediction.
It's like every other technology in the computer industry, it either has to hit critical mass or be overrun. SCSI was supposed to take over for IDE. What happened? PIO->UDMA->SATA and it just keeps going, SCSI is only holding their own on servers. Likewise with SDRAM->DDR->DDR-2, it simply evolved past the supposed "conqueror".
There was no foul play here. Rambus went up against momentum, and lost. Hell, even Intel appears to have lost it with the Itanic. With x86-64 and IA32e, momentum has spoken. People are used to computers improving all the time already. If you want them to change, you need either backwards compatibility or a small miracle in performance.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Believe it or not, Rambus corporation is likely no more unethical in their business practices as the DRAM manufacturers - see the Micron and Hynix squabble, with accompanying governmental levies and fines. Look to the fact that at least a few governments have cartel investigations on the books against these corporations.
Here is what can be stated most objectively:
-Rambus's RDRAM technology was, and is, technologically interesting
-The console gaming makers realized this and have used it extensively
-Intel designed the P4 around it - obviously there's some good ideas there
-Compared to conventional DRAM technology, RDRAM is unique in that it improves its latency characteristics with every generation. Have you guys read any technical documents about DDR and DDR2? DDR2 scales very poorly: latencies and timings get looser and looser while overall MHz speeds increment more and more slowly.
-To get any real benefit from DDR2 you need a dual-channel configuration which requires prohibitively complex board designs and more pcb layers on the mainboard. Compare this with RDRAM, with its lower pincount and simplified board design.
-Due to Rambus Inc's pariah status, Intel had to shy away from them. However, even Intel couldn't ignore the merits of Rambus technology and is developing a new DRAM tech suscpiciously similiar in nature to RDRAM: FB-DIMM.
One can find a good overview of FB-DIMM "fully buffered dual inline memory module" technology here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15167
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15189
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15214
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=15379
Peace
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Specifically (and this is all from memory):
Its big advantage was streaming, pumping out a very fast flow of sequential bits. Intel and others were at the time enamored of "convergence" (e.g. playing movies on your computer, which we now know is evil :-),
and it was thought this was a good thing for multimedia.
Except there were of course tradeoffs: you paid several prices in addition to the royalties. The two killers were slow startup time, which made random access speeds bad (which turned out to be critical), and its bit? serial interface, which required something like 600MHz traces on a motherboard, which was well beyond the realistic state of the art at the time. Intel did two separate million part recalls, one for a chipset, and one for a motherboard (just weeks before shipping...). (Note that your fast FSB busses obtain their speeds by using the signal edges cleverly, not by pushing the motherboard trace speeds outrageously.)
(It was also said that Intel higher engineering management forced this down the throats of their engineers who had to try to make it work, and fired anyone who was too persistent in pointing out the Emperor had no clothes. Well, Intel paid a pretty big price for this debacle....)
As far as I'm concerned, it died a well deserved death. The only question I see in this case as others have pointed out is exactly what did the manufacturers say to each other, and can a judge or jury be convinced it was illegal collusion instead of trading gripes. You do have to be careful what you say to your competitors; many companies have strict rules to try to avoid this sort of mess, since it does happen.
RDRAM tech may have been better (in theory), but the implementations available certainly weren't.
i820, anyone?
The only volume chipset I recall that was faster with RDRAM was the dual-channel i840 (I think that's the right number). It was only a smidge faster, and only for a short while before DDR boards caught back up. And it cost an arm and a leg and at least your neighbor's first-born.
Better, aye, but at too high a cost. Intel had contractual obligations to push RDRAM, but everyone else in the market saw an immature, litigious company asking a lot of money for marginally better tech which may or may not have panned out in the market. That's a lot of risk to assume for precious little gain. It's no wonder the memory makers didn't jump on the bandwagon wholeheartedly.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
So your saying that an effort by independent producers to thwart a semi-monopoly is collusion????
The fact is that JEDEC had been meeting well before Rambus came into being. They had been developing memory standards for a very long time. In fact, Rambus joined JEDEC and attempted to monopolize the memory market via seeding JEDEC processes with patented technologies.
JEDEC is not a cartel. They aren't trying to squeeze or force anyone in or out of a market. They are an open association of companies that work to their common benefit. Anyone can join provided they have the capital. Anyone can license the technology.
Better watch out. If the logic behind this suit is successfull, Microsoft will sue Linus Torvalds for a conspiracy to make Microsoft Windows IP worthless by artificially driving down prices with "givaway" products. Every Linux contributor would be a co-defendant.
Rambus memory ultimately failed because it was ill-tailored for most of the PC market. The vast majority of PC applications rely on massive numbers of low bandwidth memory operations. Rambus memory carried significant penalties for latency. It's only appropriate for high volume web servers and video processing applications.
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
1) Rambus originally sued because technology they presented to JEDEC that became key for DDR memory was secretly patented by them. After DDR gained marketshare, they turned around & surprised everyone with a lawsuit over that technology. I don't see what your story has to do with that issue.
2) You have any references for any of this?
3) You just registered as RDRAMman & posted this one comment. If you're going to troll, don't be so obvious.
4) You suck.
Gee you wonder why memory prices are high. Just look back a few years when DDR was produced for less than manufacture cost. That was compliments of your three amigos that artificially suppressed prices so that they could call RDRAM expensive. Now that Intel is not using RDRAM the prices just magically increased. That's why Rambus is suing for antitrust. It has now become apparent through previous legal proceedings that IFX, Micron, Hynix and others have conspired to work the memory industry against Rambus and the consumers.
Yes, it failed because it was expensive, but RAMBUS contends it was expensive NOT because of their royalties, but because the memory manufacturers didn't want it to be successful, so the memory manufacturers got together and conspired to MAKE it expensive.
RAMBUS believes that without the alleged price collusion of the manufacturers artificially inflating the price of the RAMBUS memory, RAMBUS's technology would have been more competitive and thus would not have failed.
Illustratively, it would be like you designing this great processor that was better than the processors made by any other vendor that had some great technology in it that you had patented. Unfortunately, you don't have multi-billions of dollars to create a fab, so you need people like Intel and IBM to make your chip for you.
Intel and IBM don't want your new technology to become accepted though, as then they'd have to pay for it, so they take your chip, which costs $100 to make, and which they pay you $2 royalties on, and all agree to sell it for $800 per chip, while selling their own chips for $200.
The price if you were not charging royalties would by $798; the price if the manufacturers had not gotten together and agreed not to sell your chip for less than $800 would have been $202.
paintball
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.
Memory prices are low. I just bought 1G for $100. That's pretty cheap.
I remember back when Dell was pushing RDRAM, the price was $800 for 256M. And that, my friend was only 2 1/2 years ago.
The whoe reason Intel is now in a battle with AMD is that AMD supported DDR and Intel backed RDRAM. The public didn't want RDRAM because it was (a) expensive -- see above (b) had no performance advantage. Dell got burned pretty badly when their very expensive PC's were being outgunned by DDR laden PC's at 1/2 the price.
Few bought RDRAM willingly, and those that did were horrified by the RAM prices.
Really amazingly bad technology. I think RAMBUS did well to trick Intel into using it for about 18 months. Even Intel came to their senses.
The REAL truth is that it was "fuggin expensive" in part due to royalty costs and in part due to the "collusion" that RAMBUS complains about. The problem is that RAMBUS management is too retarded to see the motive behind the collusion, which is what has to be established to prove the chip makers were acting illegally.
To put it briefly: RAMBUS invents a nifty new technology and thinks its kung-fu is so good that it patents the crap out of it and does a fancy dog and pony show to the linkes of Intel, Micron, Siemens and so on. Said show is well received and people get on board. When everyone is rip roarin' to go, RAMBUS says "oh yeah, we forgot to mention the little thing about our protection money---pay up or we'll break your kneecaps so you can never run again".
This is where the collusion comes in. Micron and other chip makers have a choice between the old, open standby PC100/PC133/SDR/DDR/whatever that is widely known and pretty much vendor neutral, or a new, incompatible and more expensive technology that puts their gonads squarely in the slowly clenching fists of RAMBUS (and Intel to some degree).
One company owns all the patents and gets all the royalties and can decide on a whim to jack up royalies or take away your license to use their technology on a whim. Based on RAMBUS's behaviour to that point who could blame the chip makers for shutting out RAMBUS en-masse? It didn't take great deal of effort and coordination for all parties to reach the same decision.
It's kind of ironic really. RAMBUS is whining about collusion and monopolistic practises of others because their attempt at monopolistic practises failed. This "collusion" wasn't driven by the desire to eliminate a competitor and cement market share, it was a common sense decision that any company would've made.
You'd think someone at RAMBUS would've heard the well worn case studies on Betamax video tape and IBMs MCA bus and avoided such bone-headedness. At least Sony didn't sue JVC, Panasonic and Toshiba because they preferred to make VHS machines instead of giving a cut of their profits to competitor Sony, and IBM didn't sue Compaq et al for creating their own EISA and VLB instead of buying MCA from IBM...
Ah, if only RAMBUS did not decide to backstab the JEDEC members, perhaps we would all be happily using RDRAM now. But RAMBUS had to squeeze every last cent, legally or illegally, ethically or unethically, and now it's reaping what it sowed. Can you say Karma?
I wish companies would realize that ethical conduct is not an optional part of doing business.
Rambus believes that RDRAM was not the success it should have been because chip makers did not want to pay their royalties.
Well, they're probably right. They thought that they could corner the market and be the only show in town. They were wrong, people opted not to pay their royalties when their patent frenzy failed.
Companies chose to go with technologies that didn't include the Rambus tax. Tough shit for them. Live with it.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano