Slashdot Mirror
Rambus Loses $4B Antitrust Case
UnknowingFool writes "In a vote of 9-3, a jury found that Micron and Hynix did not collude to manipulate DRAM prices in a violation of California anti-trust law against Rambus. The jury also ruled that the Idaho based Micron and the South Korea based Hynix did not interfere with Rambus' relationship with Intel. On the first point, Rambus argued the two chip makers conspired to keep Rambus RDRAM prices high while artificially keeping their SDRAM prices low. Micron and Hynix countered that high RDRAM prices were due to technical problems of the design. On the second point, an Intel manager testified that Rambus contract stipulations soured the relationship. The clause that Rambus insisted and would not waive was that to use Rambus RDRAM, Intel had to agree to give Rambus the ability to block Intel processors if Rambus felt Intel was not promoting RDRAM sufficiently. Rambus initiated the suit and the $4B was how much Rambus calculated it lost in profits."
The leech that used the courts.
No hard feelings, eh?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Microsoft comes to mind
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
They lost four dollars and a capital B it seems.
it has been well-established that Rambus ran off to patent a developing industry standard in RDRAM, stealing what was to be a public standard. they can rot in hell with 640K, they have it coming. got all the morals of Darl McBride and his little troll company.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I wish Karma would come back and wipe out all the trolls! I will settle for it one at a time. Perhaps the MAFIAA's will be next. I made it a point never to buy anything with RDRAM in it after those lawsuits RAMBUS filed. Maybe if we are lucky they will go RAMBUST.
Such good tech but could never be competitive. Will be a shame when they fold.
And there was much rejoicing.
nuff said
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
an Intel manager testified that Rambus contract stipulations soured the relationship. The clause that Rambus insisted and would not waive was that to use Rambus RDRAM, Intel had to agree to give Rambus the ability to block Intel processors if Rambus felt Intel was not promoting RDRAM sufficiently.
Wow. I'd have told them to F off too...
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
But I saved $4 billion by not using RDRAM in my home PC!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Intel had to agree to give Rambus the ability to block shipments of Intel processors if Rambus felt Intel was not promoting RDRAM sufficiently
Summary gets confusing when you leave words out.
They kept licensing fees very high, so why would their chips also not be high? I remember Rambus being more then twice the price and no one being able to negotiate with Rambus for cheaper prices. I had to change Rambus motherboards out to SDRAM motherboards to upgrade customers memory economically.
Rambus was relevant as discussion fodder on Slashdot, and Slashdot was relevant in some way as well.
Yes, they've acted in bad faith, repeatedly. And they've misused the courts. They are essentially a patent troll.
However, all the RAM you use is derived in part from Rambus technologies. SDRAM and it's descendants (DDR, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, etc.) all derive some of their technology from Rambus technologies. So, hate their behavior (they've certainly earned your hatred), but they have helped to advance the industry.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
...
Imagine a world without Slashdot, for surely, without this stuff as fodder you'd be able to hear a pin drop in here.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
this place is quite silent already. There are no voices of reason and the rest don't matter anyway.
I was just starting in the IT industry when Rambus came out. Part of my quiz as a low-level tech for my first IT job was to ID some pieces of hardware. I had been building PCs using AMD & SDRAM for quite a while, due to how cheaper they were vs. Intel. I was handed a Rambus chip, and my exact response was:
"It's memory, and it has a heatsink. Either it's high-performance, or very inefficient"
Got the job, and I soon learned it turned out it was the latter. I saw how much Rambus sucked firsthand, and was glad when regular DDR RAM started to take its place. Farewell, it wasn't nice knowing you.
Imagine a world, where people weren't in fact sheep and could think for themselves for a moment.
Well, as luck has it, Rambus had a great client in Sony, who used Rambus ram in both the ps2 and ps3. So Rambus could play all these games with the courts in part due to geeks playing Skyrim on their PS3's.
I remember looking at the Rambus approach back in the nineties, and it didn't look practical. High latency, high power consumption, high cost, high complexity (which implies lower yield, which drives cost) and my most favorite of all, a single vendor. I didn't see why anyone would buy their stuff. Yes, they had the fastest throughput for awhile, but throughput isn't everything.
Does this mean they're finished as a company? Does anyone still buy Rambus devices?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Rambus had also accounts with Sun Microsystems to integrate Rambus technology into their memory infrastructures. Also, when HP was making it's revision to their holding of Compaq's DEC Alpha architecture they achieved godly bandwidth that excelled over architectures of Intel and AMD. HP never released any RECENT systems using Rambus. It's like nothing makes the light of day when it comes to Alpha (ever since Intel Itanium was forced on everyone). What we are seeing from Rambus today is their critique over COMPETING monopolists. Sadly in this patent SYSTEM it is being used to assert violence on 3rd-world countries to corner a market. I would blame Intel for losing all the diversity in computer architectures. This past 15 years has been the destruction and liquidation of all in-house chip fabrications and competing lines of computer systems at the hands of what appears to be agents of other corporations becoming CEO double-agents. It's truly sickening. Homebrew computing has never been the same.
Meanwhile, in court, the FCC lawyers prosecuting Rambus were direct hires from Hynix, Micron, Samsung, etc.
Even if that were true... What effect does a specific lawyer for one of the sides have any effect on how the case turns out? They argue their case in front of a jury, it's not like these industry lawyers have hypnotic powers over the jury or if they have some ability to change the laws and evidence that was presented because of where they previously worked. I'll admit, if they got some lawyers from the back of the phone book that does personal injury claims for a living, they may not have won..
So I google searched RDRAM vs. SDRAM and found the first page basically entirely pro-RDRAM pages, many of them old, saying the stuff was basically gloriously great with the only exception being its high cost. You ever wonder if a company would hire a contractor to google bomb some info if they are in a major court case and want to try to influence jurors who may be doing some after-school research? It took a few pages before I found a realistic retrospective page. I contrast, the same realistic retrospective page was visible on the first page of bing.com
Not saying it DID happen, but saying it could have happened and probably does happen.
Bottom line was:
Chip companies weren't making money on it
RDRAM took up a larger amount of the die so you got less parts per wafer
RDRAM was more complicated so there were more things that could go wrong in the fab process and thus lower yields
RDRAM was inherently marked up due to royalties
RDRAM was not widely adopted beyond intel motherboards
RDRAM made little difference to the average user
Companies aren't working for free and aren't going to sell a product cheaper and at a loss when they have a more lucrative alternative
> On the subject of productivity in the past ten years, Rambus has produced the memory controller for the Cell processor, developed the first quad-data-rate memory, and other notable things.
And they were the first to design the memory bus as a proper terminated bus. DDR3 still does not do that - it relies on the connections between all the memory chips (even across modules) being very short. I think they really have something there. But their business attitude seems to be pretty evil, so nobody wants to touch it.
Rule number one in business: it is never a good idea to sue your customers, even if you are right.
Dear RAMBUS,
Rot in hell, fuckers. In the summer of '02 I spent $500 on four 128-meg sticks of RAMBUS ram for my new P4. Two months later, my best friend bought a new AMD dual-core with two 512 chips of SDRAM. I recall the memory cost him around $200.
So fuck you, RAMBUS, fuck you.
Love, AC