All but 3 RAMBUS claims dismissed...

[ahartman]

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=cd_mh

"RICHMOND, Va.--Shares in memory chip designer Rambus shares fell more than 6 percent Tuesday after a news service reported that a federal judge threw out most of the company's patent-infringement claims against German chipmaker Infineon Technologies."

[rylan]

Man, I can't wait until the judge makes a summary judgement on the rest of the claims.
Look at their stock price drop.. heheheheh

[SCompRacer]

Maybe there is justice after all...

Think there will be much of an impact to Rambus once Intel finally makes a chipset to support DDR?

[rylan]

I think that will be pretty much the final blow to Rambust.
Pretty much any hardware designer who has a clue about memory bus architecture will design around DDR for the future, and not Rambus.
Rambus is pretty much relying on Intel to keep supporting Rambus so they can make money off of royalties, while other markets are moving away from rambus (thank god).

[The Rock]

I can't believe Intel was stupid enough to sign a 3-year deal with these Rambus losers. The end of that 3 years is almost here (or so Im told), so Intel can now make a DDR P4 without fear of violating their deal with Rambus and try to boost lagging sales.

Bart

[This message has been edited by The Rock (edited 01 May 2001).]

[rylan]

Intel got into that 3 year or so Rambust-exclusive deal because they _heavily_ invested into Rambus corp. Basically Intel thought they could buy their way into the memory market, then shove their new standard (Rambus) down everyones' throats. All I can say is thank god for AMD and the high performance out of their SDRAM/DDR based systems. If it was up to Intel, we'd all be stuck buying 128MB sticks of Rambus for $300 and slapping them in our Pee3 900MHz systems, after paying $800 for the cpu.

So, I look at it this way.. Intel gets screwed for trying to force a crappy standard on the industry, and RAmbus becomes the evil hated company of the memory market, that will eventually vanish.

By the way.. that contract only says Intel cannot make non-rambus chipsets, hence Via technologies is making DDR chipsets for the Pee4 cpu. But somehow I can't see the PEe4 doing any better with DDR, since it already underperforms with Rambus (which its optimised for.. lol).

[dZeus]

before everyone starts dissing RDRAM and hyping DDR, think about the following:

Rambus Inc. as a company and it's functioning are completely different from the rambus memory architecture. As in Rambus Inc. sucks in how they (try) to make money (and I hope they'll die soon), but rambus as a memory standard may not be as bad as many people think, neither is DDR the holy grail people think.

For videocards DDR is very nice, but for P3 and Athlon systems, DDR won't make much of a performance increase over SDR DRAM. (Fact when you look at DDR benchmarks for these platforms). Of course RDRAM also doesn't make this performance difference (as shown on Intel's P3 RDRAM implementation), but it _DOES_ on their P4 architecture. Currently there's been a lot of speculation on how DDR will function compared to the current dual-channel RDRAM implementation, and most people agree that it will probably fall short of RDRAM at higher CPU speeds.

So don't write off RDRAM as a stupid memory architecture right away... though you can bash Rambus Inc. as much as you like

[Wombat]

It's (RDRAM) a pretty messy memory architecture as well when it's implemented on a PC-size scale. I've heard horror stories about the efforts intel engineers have gone through trying to meet RDRAM's timing requirements (negative signal propagation time, etc).

[Liquid Snake]

Also RDRAM has higher latency than SDRAM. But its advantage is that it has a lot of bandwidth (as benchmarks show).

[rylan]

Yup.. Jammrock made good points. Rambus has high internal bandiwdth, but crappy high latency. Plus the Rambus data bus is only _16-bits_ wide.. its like trying to get traffic from an 8 lane superhighway to all merge into a 1 lane offramp, thereby adding to the latency. In addition, as you add additional rambus modules, it slows down the existing ones due to the additional loading.

I'm not saying that DDR is the 'holy grail' but its a lot more attractive and easier to design around than Rambus and its amazingly low tolerance and high output of EMI.

Rambus tried to sneak around JDEC and patent the info in there that was being used to make memory standards, along with other illegal pantening tactics. Time for them to bit it.

[Jammrock]

RDRAM was designed with one thing in mind...servers. Not workstations or gaming computers...servers. Server RAM needs immense amounts of bandwidth, but latency isn't that important. So in this case, RDRAM is ideal for the server platform. Plain and simple.

For gaming and multimedia, the story changes. Not only do you need immense amounts of bandwidth, but you need incredibly low latencies to push the graphical data across the bus faster. In this case low latency SDRAM and DDR RAM is more ideal.

The current problem is that the motherboard and CPU architectures are not truely optimized for DDR RAM (and technically the same goes for RDRAM). This is why I am waiting for the Palamino core to be released before I get a new CPU. With it's beefed up branch prediction and larger internal pipe in combo with the AMD 760 chipset, it should be more suited for DDR RAM. Hopefully...


As for Rambus the company...everybody in the memory industry hates them! Why? Because they are a bunch of bastards. They submarine patent all the 'open standards' that were made in the JDEC. Then they wait until everyone is making SDRAM and DDR RAM and there's no going back, and ... SURPRISE!!! We hold all those patents, now pay up or we'll sue your @$$.

Infineon is going to take Rambus to the cleaners. Micron will too...assuming Rambus can even fight that battle after Infineon is through with them.

Jammrock

------------------
Athlon 650
256 MB PC133 CAS3 from Crucial
87 GB storage from WD & IBM
Matrox G400 (it's not dead yet!)
SB Live! the original full retail, still going strong
Klipsch ProMedia v.2-400, the PC speakers that goes BOOM!
Hope Matrox releases the G800 before rebuild time, becuase the end is near!

[Technoid]

It almost killed me when a Customer came into our shop and wanted to buy a P4 system with that superfast Rdram memmory that was so "fast" at application togling...

He also claimed that rdram was brand new and faster than everything else...

---------------------------------------------

One thing that I always wonder about is:

If RDRAM is so fast why hawent we seen it on a suuper expensive geforce2 card?

[ahartman]

Can you say... GAME OVER?

"just in: A federal judge in Virginia on Friday threw out the three remaining patent infringement claims brought by memory chip designer Rambus in its case against European chipmaker Infineon."

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200...html?tag=mn_hd

[The PIT]

Ah that is is good news.
Hip Hip Hurray

[Thundrchez]

And there was much rejoicing. http://www.ebnews.com/story/OEG20010504S0059