Rambus Production Capacity Switched to Make SDRAM

Jon Rabone writes " NEC, Japan's largest chipmaker is halting Rambus production to make SDRAM. Both NEC and Samsung are to switch production over to SDRAM - sounds to me like RAMBUS could be in danger of dying the death, after Intel's latest problems with the Camino chipset. At least we might see SDRAM prices fall again. "

Comments

Mandated technology

[overshoot]

• Not really surprising. Engineering by fiat fails if trumped by a Higher Authority (e.g., physics)
  
• The problem isn't the Camino chip, it's the physics. Turns out that Rambus has a major signal-integrity failure mode that sort of got swept under the rug until the systems houses got bit by it.
  
• The DRAM companies never liked Rambus, but had their arms twisted by Intel. Now they have a chance to bail and are taking it.
  
• The comment about DDR (double-data-rate SDRAM) having no standard will come as quite a surprise to the people at the memory companies and in particular JEDEC's JC-42 memory committee, which thinks that they have issued one, and AMII, which is sponsored by the memory industry (including NEC and Samsung) to promote its use.

Re:Blame it on the quake?

[R. Anthony]

The reason the prices got so high this year was because of the quake in Taiwan.

Not so. I was following the market closely before during and after the quake. I used corsair PC 133 128 MB as a marker, as it uses Micron DRAM which is not produced in Taiwan, and in no way would be effected by the quake (it also happend to be the brand I choose and now own, due to it's superior quality). Here is a timeline of the price spikes:

I chose direct.multiwave.com (wholesaler) as my test bed.

Monday (prior to quake): $297

Sept 22nd (day of the quake, wednesday): $297

Sept 24th $297

Sept 29th: $358

Oct 7th: $372

So you see, the prices were already at $300 before the quake. The subsequent rises could be attributed to Micron raising the price of DRAM to over $16 after the 22th, the day of the quake.