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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.
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.
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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.
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?
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.
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
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.
No problem.
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... --
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
In Soviet Russia, Monopolist sues YOU for anti-trust!
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.
....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" ----------
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.