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Rambus Loses $4B Antitrust Case

Posted by samzenpus on from the take-it-on-the-chin dept.

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."

34 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Rambus... by ackthpt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The leech that used the courts.

    No hard feelings, eh?

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  2. .... and it's not the only leech by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Microsoft comes to mind

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    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:.... and it's not the only leech by Billly+Gates · · Score: 5, Informative

      Rambus is or was pretty evil.

      Didn't they go out of business? First they attended the sdram IEE conferences where the design of SDRAM was discussed and how all the memory chip makters would make it back in 1992. Rambus immediately called the headquarters and patented the whole spec on purpose to sue everyone out of existence to force their own proprietary design.

      Then they gave away 25% of their shares to Intel below market value in exchange for using only Rambus ram. Intel woudl get billions in kickbacks if SDRAM went out of existence and gave a financial incentive.

      Then they sued everyone and if it were not for AMD Rambus would be the next monopoly in ram. AMD still used Sdram which many of us preferred over the high latency and $$$ rambus. They lost and thank god. We would be stuck with $200 512 meg ram chips today with just rambus existing and probably no flash drives.

      They were worse than MS in my opinion and filled with greed.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    2. Re:.... and it's not the only leech by i_b_don · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Please, MS has NOTHING on Rambus when it comes to using the courts.

      d

      --
      all language nazi's will burne in heil!
    3. Re:.... and it's not the only leech by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Rambus must have some sort of war chest for suits and appeals. They've been at it for over a decade. By appearance it seems they're developing Lawyer Technology rather than memory technology.

      While the potential of a $12 billion or even $4 billion pay off might be considered mouthwatering, they'd probably have made that kind of money by now if they were putting all their money into R&D, manufacturing and licencing of revolutionary technologies.

      It may look like thinking bit, but it's really very negative, thinking small.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    4. Re:.... and it's not the only leech by TheWanderingHermit · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You've described it pretty well. One of their earliest cases was in Richmond, VA and I sat in to videotape a lot of the depositions. (That's how long it's been going on -- VHS and SVHS were still in use when they started suing everyone. That was around 2000-2001.)

      They admitted in depositions they were in on the meetings when the standards were drawn up and had no reason for not objecting to designs that were supposedly theirs.

      I have to admit, the Rambus lawyers were polite and easy to work with. The lawyers for the other company (a German firm) were mostly from one New York office and were just plain rude and nasty.

      I remember one deposition in particular where there was a top memory expert giving testimony and they asked him about flip-flops and if they were memory. They (the Rambus lawyers) were trying to get him to say a flip-flop was a one bit memory and he kept saying, "Under certain conditions." The lawyer was stumped and started getting worse and worse (the only time I saw a Rambus lawyer start to get nasty) because he not only couldn't get him to give the answer they wanted, but the lawyer had no understanding of what any Electronics 101 student would know. I had a hard time not laughing and shaking the camera during the time that topic was being covered. It was pretty clear to me that lawyer had not fully prepared and didn't know at all what the topic was with flip-flops. I would have loved to have stayed in that one all day, since I figured it would only get more technical and confuse the lawyer even more, but someone took my place so I could finish some editing.

    5. Re:.... and it's not the only leech by thue · · Score: 5, Informative

      > Then they sued everyone and if it were not for AMD Rambus would be the next monopoly in ram. AMD still used Sdram which many of us preferred over the high latency and $$$ rambus.

      It was not just AMD which used SDRAM. Other companies made chipsets and motherboards which worked with Intel CPUs and used SDRAM.

      As RDRAM failed to match SDRAM technically and price-wise, Intel was saved by their competitors selling Intel-compatible chipsets, for otherwise few people would have bough Intel CPUs. Because Intel was contractually obligated to only ship RDRAM-compatible motherboards.

    6. Re:.... and it's not the only leech by Fluffeh · · Score: 2

      Rambus is or was pretty evil.

      Then they sued everyone and if it were not for AMD Rambus would be the next monopoly in ram. AMD still used Sdram which many of us preferred over the high latency and $$$ rambus. They lost and thank god.

      And the share market punished them today. Like really punished. Opening Stock price $18.04. Closing stock price $7.11. That's a 60% drop, and when you consider that the company (was) worth in the billions, that is a massive massive drop for a single day.

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    7. Re:.... and it's not the only leech by klui · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If SCO can last nearly a decade I'm not surprised Rambus's lawsuits would last as long if not longer.

    8. Re:.... and it's not the only leech by tlhIngan · · Score: 2

      Rambus must have some sort of war chest for suits and appeals. They've been at it for over a decade. By appearance it seems they're developing Lawyer Technology rather than memory technology.

      Didn't they go out of business?

      Unfortunately, not only are they still in business, they're still licensing designs.

      In fact, maybe you have some Rambus-using stuff in your house, and maybe it was used in the past day.

      And not only does Rambus have licensing revenue coming in for the near future, they may also be set for the next 10 years or so too.

      Three characters: P, S, and 3.

      10 years ago, when RDRAM was on its way out, Rambus picked up a licensor that was worth WAY more than all the RDRAM modules ever sold. The most popular console of that generation, the PlayStation 2, had 32MB of RDRAM.

      The PS3, has 512MB of non-shared memory, split as 256MB of GDDR3 for the RSX, ... and 256MB of QDR-DRAM, basically the next-gen RDRAM, licensed from Rambus. Certainly while the PS3 is not the most popular console, it still has respectable sales volume, and each PS3 sold means a little more money in Rambus' bank account.

      Now, there's no guarantee that the PS4 will use RDRAM, but it's a possibility, which would mean Rambus has continuous source of income for the life of the PS4. Maybe they can extend it to the PS5, maybe.

    9. Re:.... and it's not the only leech by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      Sorry friend but i'm betting Win 8 is Vista the second coming. people were curious about win 7 but when i showed them win 8 all i got was HATRED that made ME look like XP.

      As for Phenom II the dirty little secret the chip manufacturers don't want you to know is except for a few niche roles chips have been beyond "good enough" for quite some time. i love to game and frankly the ONLY reason I'm going to Thuban is because it is cheap and I like to transcode and the software i use scales with CPUs. but for gaming its always GPU not CPU bound and for just about every other job the CPU sits there twiddling its thumbs waiting on work. I'm a serious multitasker and frankly the ONLY time I slam my Deneb is transcoding, everything else I have power to spare.

      So unless your board is shot or your board simply can't take a decent amount of RAM, say 4Gb to 8Gb, honestly there really isn't any reason ATM to go A series on the desktop. In every bench I've seen Thuban and often Deneb are neck and neck or even beating A series, and when you figure in the 20-30% premium for the chips and boards? not worth it. The mobile side is another story, with Brazos costing atom money but besting ION while using less power and having less heat. Oh and the chips hold 8Gb of RAM which is damned sweet for a 3 pound netbook.

      I'd say get you a Deneb or even better Thuban, load your board with RAM, and enjoy. I've got mine loaded with 8Gb of RAM and honestly the games I'm playing hasn't even required the replacement of my HD4850 yet, so why switch and pay the early adopter penalty? you are still supporting AMD by buying Phenom II or Brazos.

      --
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    10. Re:.... and it's not the only leech by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      Ypur old posts were very critical of Windows 7 and when it came out it wasn't that bad.

      Win 8 is still in development so I hope MS comes to its senses as it is testing the METRO tile which would be great on a tablet. Ars Technica had a story where MS wanted to get rid of the start button so I dread you might be right. As of today no one should still be running XP. I mean come on! Vista with it being bad and many years late taught the accountants and even average Joes that using obsolete browsers and operating systems are a good investment and if Windows 7 becomes a 10 year OS it will be norm for now on. I do not want to wait until 2019 to enjoy HTML 5 because of IE 8/win 7 being the 2010s equilivant of 2000s XP/IE 6, and would hate develiping a cool html 5 site for phones only because win 8 bombs and freaks 1/3 of the population and all of corporate america out making the rest of us suffer.

      If even MS includes a more friendly mouse aware Windows 8 where apps go into a dekstop mode it would be more tollerable. Windows 8 is even lighter and can run on less hardware than Windows 7. It is a great OS with a medocre desktop bolted on top. I still hope the final builds will be better as it is not even beta yet.

      I fear you may be right and Windows 9 will put the start menu back on. We will see if MS is smart as they have R&D and usability testing unlike Gnome which threw theirs out from Sun in Gnome 2. Vista, was the oddball as Balmer/Gates didn't care as long as it was out fearing people would stick with Xp. Their fears proved true. I will keep my Phenom II as it has a nice HD 5750 on the asus and is a great value. It runs Wow fine and the upcomming Star Wars the Old Republic. I need to use it for work like running VMs and photoshop and it will suit for years to come. If I were buying today I would pick an Icore 5, or llamo for a notebook. Bulldozers are not good and ghz per ghz the phenom II offer a better value under w7 if you have a video card.

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
  3. let us not forget Rambus stole it by swschrad · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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    1. Re:let us not forget Rambus stole it by TWX · · Score: 2

      I don't honestly know if the technology was worthwhile anyway. I mean, you had to use friggin' placeholders in memory slots that had no ram in them. That's a stupid, sophomoric mistake in my opinion. I could understand such in development, but once one goes production to keep your technology that screwed up... *sigh*

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    2. Re:let us not forget Rambus stole it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's just due to the nature of transmission lines. To maintain good signal integrity on a multi-drop bus, you'd either have to populate the bus in a certain order or to keep the bus looking the same regardless of how many of the slots are actually populated by having place holders simulating the load. This is not something specific to RDRAM only. You will see these problems on large enterprise systems that uses multiple dimms off the same bus/controller. Not user friendly, that's for sure though.

      You avoid this by limiting the number of slots per bus/controller or just go point-to-point.

    3. Re:let us not forget Rambus stole it by Attila+Dimedici · · Score: 5, Informative

      The way I understood it (which does not make it any better) was that when the standard was being developed they said, "We've got this nifty-neat idea that we think would solve this problem in the new standard." Everybody else said, "Yeah, that will work." Then after the standard was established and everybody was working on moving over to it, Rambus said, "Oh, by the way, we have a patent on that essential piece of this new standard and everyone will have to pay us license fees to use it."
      I may be mistaken and your take may be more accurate, but either way, it is good to see such scum lose in court.

      --
      The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
    4. Re:let us not forget Rambus stole it by Solandri · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's pretty much it. JEDEC required all participants to disclose any patents or pending patents on technology being discussed. That was the whole point of JEDEC - so memory manufacturers could weigh the technical merits of ideas against their licensing costs, and decide together whether or not it should go into the next standard. Rambus did not disclose, causing some ideas they had (secretly) patented to wind up in the standard under the assumption that there was no licensing cost.

      The courts actually found that Rambus was in breach of contract for violating JEDEC's membership guidelines this way. The problem was, that was just a contractual violation, not a legal one. JEDEC's guidelines did not specify what sort of punishment should befall any company which did secretly patent the technology under discussion. So even though RAMBUS was guilty of breach of contract, the only recourse left to JEDEC was to kick Rambus out. The patents, despite being obtained through or having their importance magnified by deceit, were still legally sound.

      Basically, JEDEC relied on the honor code for its members to behave. Rambus took advantage of that to secretly misbehave and screw everyone over. Unfortunately, the anti-trust investigations into memory price fixing came soon after, and under the two-front assault most of the memory manufacturers settled with Rambus, which allowed them to drag this on for as long as it has.

    5. Re:let us not forget Rambus stole it by klui · · Score: 3, Informative

      The JEDEC did not kick Rambus out of the organization. Rambus participated in the SDRAM talks but they didn't like JEDEC's terms. They filed submarine patents while participating in the standards discussions, withdrew from JEDEC and then started suing various manufacturers.

  4. About time by jishak · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:About time by TWX · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Unfortunately RIAA/MPAA has a lot better claim to what they enforce against, mainly because are society is stupid and allows someone to own their cultural contributions much longer than they deserve to. 20, 30 years, okay. I can see that. In perpetuity? That's wrong.

      At least the motion picture industry is getting smart and releasing movies cheap. There are DVDs available retail new for $5, Blu-ray for $10. The RIAA doesn't understand that so much music is pirated because people don't want to pay more for the movie soundtrack than they do for the movie itself. It's a lot easier to put up with the MPAA when the cost to attempt to thwart is just about as high as the cost to just buy the damn disc, if one factors time into account.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  5. Rambus lost $4 Billion suit... by demonbug · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And there was much rejoicing.

  6. Thats one hell of a clause... by Local+ID10T · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Thats one hell of a clause... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Rambus was evil from the getgo. Intel just got greedy.

      This is how supply and demand really works, if your kit is too expensive, you go use someone elses kit. It was a bloody winfall for AMD, but they didn't capitalize on it in time and it wasn't until the x64 instructions that AMD suddenly was the better option until Intel came out with it's core i5/i7 chips, effectively taking the only remaining performance point in AMD's favor (memory controller in the cpu.)

      AMD , as far as CPU's go, has nothing in it's favor unless it can beat Intel on power/thermal design. Intel doesn't make (good) graphics chips, so AMD 's GPU's are still the winning choice in 2/3rds of the market. But that's more of a "Intel catchup from a 10 year lead AMD has" in every PC I've had I've replaced the GPU twice for every one time I've replaced the CPU. When you integrate the GPU, that's a wasted piece of the CPU that doesn't get used half way through the life of the machine.

      I don't think I'll ever end up buying AMD CPU's again until it makes 3Ghz 8 core CPU's that consume 45 watts. Likewise with Intel, I won't buy any of the TDP>50watt cpu's because at full power the 95+ ones consume a third of the power available. If you want to run a SLI setup(2 x HD6990 =500watts each,) people in the US/Canada/Japan are going to be fucked over buying all the top parts because a 15A circuit won't suffice anymore.

      The joke about bitcoin farms being confused for grow-ops is getting pretty close to reality. Get the thermal envelope of the entire system to under 700 watts.

      Anyhow, RAMBUS got greedy, Intel got greedy, Intel had to throw out the entire Pentuim 4 architecture in the end and pick up where the Pentium 3 left off. Rambus products are only found in PS3's now, and at the next console cycle they'll have no customers at all.

      And what did we learn from this crapfest?

      Don't be evil, Don't be greedy, because doing so invites competition to eat your lunch.

    2. Re:Thats one hell of a clause... by ChrisMaple · · Score: 4, Interesting

      AMD had superior processors for several years. Motherboard and name brand computer manufacturers were too slow to incorporate AMD's product, and to some extent AMD was production limited. Part of the reluctance of computer manufacturers to shift to AMD was due to (illegal) contracts restricting the manufacturers to exclusive use of Intel processors.

      By the time AMD had gained significant market share, Intel was starting to recover from its design blunders and challenging AMD's performance dominance. For AMD, the gain in market share had come too late to enable them to make the gains stick.

      Intel has the cash and intelligence to stay a generation ahead in silicon technology. For Intel to lose the performance lead again, they'd have to make a clusterfuck like the P4 again.

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  7. But I saved $!! by cvtan · · Score: 2

    But I saved $4 billion by not using RDRAM in my home PC!

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  8. Clarification of Summary by Bill+Dimm · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:Rambust by billcopc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They helped to advanced the industry by patenting once-public ideas ? I cannot agree with that statement on any level.

    If anyone should be accused of articially maintaining high RAM prices, it's Rambus. Their trolling and subsequent royalty racket has cost the world far more than 4 billion, not to mention the costly and frustrating period where Intel boards exclusively supported Rambus. That move alone set the SDRAM industry back a few years.

    Rambus is the perfect example of how NOT to run a tech company. Leave IP theft to the Chinese, at least they don't patent the stuff they steal.

    --
    -Billco, Fnarg.com
  10. Re:Rambust by gstrickler · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wrong. Rambus submitted much of the SDRAM specifications to the group, they didn't steal it from the group. They failed to disclose they they were seeking a patent on the technologies, and as because of that failure to disclose, have lost much of the revenue they might have made had they properly disclosed it.

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  11. Ha! I remember Rambus. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  12. Re:Rambust by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Guess that depends on which court ruling you refer to. The article you mention describes repeated appeals with different outcomes in each case. Neither the courts nor the regulatory bodies have shown themselves capable of grasping or even caring about the technical history of the RAM business. Rather than wikipedia, you might want to check out old issues of EETimes or read postings from the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware newsgroup in the 1999-2001 timeframe.

  13. Re:Rambust by slashfoxi · · Score: 2

    It had all been done before, but Rambus added the idea of doing it -- for RAM!

    A protocol bus -- for RAM!
    Terminated, controlled-impedance transmission lines -- for RAM!
    Differential (actually threshold-based pseudo-differential) signaling -- for RAM!
    Source synchronous clocking -- for RAM!
    Delay-locked loops -- for RAM!
    Bidirectional signalling using (current-mode drivers) -- for RAM!

    When I worked there I patented the principle of linearity when it is used in time-domain simulations -- for RAM! (One of the less valuable but most crazy ideas.)

    All that silliness aside, I don't think Rambus' 2.5% royalty justifies the price premium for RDRAM. However, the fancy wafer-scale packaging, the impossibility of production testing at 800Mbps in the year 2000 and the horrific heat generated by those 28-ohm current-mode drivers was enough to kill the technology.

  14. Re:Rambust by ChrisMaple · · Score: 2

    If they had disclosed it, the standard would probably have been different. Standard making groups generally don't want to base their standard on a technology owned by a single company.

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  15. And nothing of value was lost by roc97007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  16. Re:Rambust by sjames · · Score: 2

    Yes, because nobody understands the minute details of modern computer technology like judges...