Rambus Inc.: I Think it's Offficially Out of Hand

[qball]

The reason why everyone is on the kill Rambus bandwagon is because it's popular. The amount of misinformation and emotion on this is incredible. There were surely some shady going ons in Rambus' history, but it is obviously not nearly as cut and dried as most people seem to think.

Bottom line is this: They were a part of JEDEC, which makes standards for RAM. Being a part of JEDEC means you sign a contract that you won't patent the stuff they are making into a standard. Well, Rambus DID, and left JEDEC, and now is suing everyone.

Sorry. Think just a little bit. If it was really this simple, then why hasn't Rambus been slaped down on it's claims? Why did legal teams pour over the facts of the case for a year before settling? Aside from this, factually this statement is incorrect. Even the cut and dried "Rambus is evil" history is a lot more complex. First of all, the patents in question are dated before Rambus joined JEDEC and the real case involves a psudo-loophole in regards to patent law.

Rambus has no doubt done some shady things in their past, but then again so has every other hardware company on the planet. Rambus is just lacking in the PR squad to do damage control, ala Microsoft. It annoys me when hardware bigots judge a technology based on its maker. Everything with an Apple logo is automatically crap; nVidia is crap; MS is crap and evil too; Rambus is satan, their engineers are all going to hell and anything that comes out of their labs is branded with the logo "steaming sack of feces". Corporate ethics and actual product quality are seperate things. Boycotting a product based on its company's ethics is certainly a statement that you won't tolerate that kind of crap. However, deluding yourself as to what you are choosing not to buy is just plain stupid. Rambus does currently have the fastest desktop memory system. Does that mean that I have Rambus in my system? Nope. To be fair, DDR may dethrone Rambus very soon, but DDR SDRAM isn't out yet and I haven't seen an A/B comparison even of eval boards yet.

The basic tech in RDRAM is very cool indeed and has a lot of potential. I am waiting to see how it performs on the P4, where it will be matched better.

-Q

[RAB]

qball,
The reason people are down on RAMBUS is not because they are popular or because their products are better. The reason is solely because of their underhanded way of doing business.

First, to my knowledge they didn't invent SDRAM but somehow managed to lay claim to the patent. Next, when their product, however good it is, was far too expensive to be competitive, rather than becoming more efficient at making it, they found a legal loophole that made everyone else's product more expensive. Sorry, but its hard to be sympathetic to a company that chooses to sue rather than make their own products competitive.

RAB

[Pertti]

Not to forget that we have been waiting for the real successor for the BX chipset for 2 years now, and thanks to Intel/Rampuss deal, we may have to wait yet another two years before we finally get one.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Sounds like RCA! They didn't invent the TV, but they claim they did; they didn't invent radio, but they claim they did. The only thing they seem to have invented is crushing the "little people" with their army of lawyers. Nah, I'm sure someone else figured that out before them too.

[Thundrchez]

Rambus is not cool. From everything I have heard, it runs VERY VERY VERY hot.

They may be the fastest memory out there b/c they use a clock doubled 400MHz (well, almost). However, in actual performance statistics, they are not the fastest.

Additionally, they are a downright nuisance to have to work with. The first I-820 mobo was supposed to have 4 rimms, but that was too much to be technically feasible so they reduced it to 3. Past the last second, they realized that they still had major problems with 3 rimms, so they reduced it to 2! And then performance slows down if you put memory in both rimms. If you only want to use 1 rimm, you have to put a terminator fake rimm in the 2nd rimm slot.

Rambus is a colossal disaster. Nobody likes it technically, and nobody likes a bunch of lawyers trying to sue everybody who has their act together. Only losers sue.

[qball]

Dual channel Rambus is the fastest non-proprietary memory system there is. That's what I was referring to in that last post. Single channel Rambus theoritically is faster most everything else, but is not the case in practice because of latency issues. However, Dual interleaved Rambus channels is the fastest you can get, both in theory and in practice. It's expensive, but it's still damn fast.

Not liking Rambus based on their business practices is perfectly valid, but it shouldn't color your opinion of their technology. Hate the company, but don't say that their stuff is complete crap because of their business tactics.

Go to Slashdot and read what people write regarding MS. Go to Amd Zone and read what they have to say about Intel. It's straight hardware bigotry and is about the most stupid and pointless thing that I see techies do. I'll commend the people on this board for being a good deal better than the examples that I gave, regarding the video market. It's just technology, think about it abstractly before you pass judgement.

-Q

[Rowan]

Food For Thought:
If DDR SDRAM is superior and cheaper, why does the PS2 and N64 use RDRAM? (I think the X-Box is also supposed to use it)

Ok, I try to tackle this one. Please check Ars Technicas memory guide for technical details.
At least PS2 and I guess N64 and Xbox use only one chip per channel. They do not use RIMMs, which is what people use to put Rambus memory on their motherboards. On one RIMM there are many (4-16? not sure) RDRAM chips.
The Rambus architecture specifies that if there are multiple chips on a channel they are daisy-chained. I.e. they take 'turns' to be active and transfer data. That's why RDRAM motherboard need to have all the empty memoryslots populated with empty RIMMs.
In the consoles the only RDRAM chip in a channel gets to be active all the time resulting in optimal performance (both latency and throughput -wise).

Food for thought:
If Rambus is so good why are high-end GeForces using DDR-RAM?

[Pertti]

Food For Thought:
If DDR SDRAM is superior and cheaper, why does the PS2 and N64 use RDRAM? (I think the X-Box is also supposed to use it)

Overall production costs.

In general, OEM companies doing whatever, are mainly interested in "How cheap can we get it done without sacrificing too much".

If by using one more expensive component, they can simplify the design of the rest of the system, they will do it because of the reduction in the total cost.

They are not interested in satisfying the needs of a relatively small group of clients, who get pissed because of the reduced functionality and speed in the simplified design, they will just invent some new slogans for the sales jerks to throw around.

If you believe whatever marketing crap they throw at you, then you deserve everything that's coming your way.

As it seems that Intel is unable/unwilling to come up with a decent chipset for us (power) users, I will have to start looking at AMD/VIA chipsets (shivers).

[isochar]

"Food for thought:
If Rambus is so good why are high-end GeForces using DDR-RAM?"

I expect it to be a combination of:
-cheaper manufacturing costs
-difficulty of implementing a dual-channel rimm setup on a small pcb.

Rumor has it that RDRAM is the choice in upcoming NV20/Rampage cards. Slightly higher latency, but the extra memory bandwidth will more than make up for it. (I know it is rumor, but it makes sense)

"As it seems that Intel is unable/unwilling to come up with a decent chipset for us (power) users, I will have to start looking at AMD/VIA chipsets (shivers)."

I know how you feel. I wish Intel didn't hold back on the 815e. SMP support, bigger AGP aperture, ECC, etc. would have made that chipset truly the next BX.

If you don't want to go the VIA route (I don't blame you) wait for the Micron chipset. I've seen promising articles on it, as long as it doesn't use a VIA southbridge.



[This message has been edited by isochar (edited 05 October 2000).]

[Wombat]

qball,
You sure do have an odd concept of non-proprietary.

[qball]

Proprietary memory systems are those used in systems like hard core IBM, Sun and SGI boxes. Rambus isn't like these.

-Q