Hidden Consequences: Rambus And DDR SDRAM Prices 171
Jimmie writes: "Looks like Rambus, Inc intends to use licensing fees arising from its recent patent settlements to force the price of DDR SDRAM to be high enough that Direct RDRAM (which we know is ridiculously expensive right now) can compete.
When asked that very question, the VP of worldwide marketing at Rambus replied 'I wouldn't argue with that conclusion.'
Story at ebnews.com." Sometimes the computer industry's oldest saying seems to be "If at first you don't succeed ... squeeze out some competition."
Whatever happened to ESDRAM and SLDRAM? (Score:3)
ESDRAM was a type of SDRAM-like memory that included a small amount of SRAM cache on each chip which lowered latency, allowed for greater utilization, and also could boost bandwidth by allowing wider buses and moderately higher speeds. Here's an ESDRAM article at Lost Circuits [lostcircuits.com].
SLDRAM was, like RDRAM, a protocol based memory. Unlike Rambus, it was developed by an industry consortium, and was to be royalty free. It allowed for a faster bus, and could also be operated at a double data rate. Supposedly, in some situations it might have actually been faster than RDRAM. Here's a link to the SLDRAM Corporation [sldram.com].
Re:doesn't make sense (Score:4)
No, it's not a monopoly, they haven't built any hotels yet.
Re:RAMBUS Sucks (Score:1)
Intel _is_ the dominant chip supplier. They supply microprocessors to 81% of PC's sold, and chipsets to a significant number. They got out of the DRAM business about 15 years ago. Intel's business is directly proportional to the number of PC's sold. The more PC's sold, the more money Intel makes. So why would it want to stifle production of memory, which would stifle production of PC's?
Re:Every industry survives - sometimes badly. (Score:2)
In this case, the single point of failure rests with the USPTO- for taking 10 years to read a piece of paper and put a stamp on it. If they had done their job correctly, we would have been paying royalties to Rambus since 1990 or so. (Whether or not this is good or bad is left as an exercise for the student).
Rev Neh
Re:Rambus, Patents, and Antitrust in the US (Score:2)
If true, then that would be truly startling, and obviously a very big win for people like Bill Gates. I don't see how such a lopsided result could ever stand up to scrutiny. Again, if true, the circuit court is looking more and more partial all the time. Witness the recent antics of the 9th circuit court in the Microsoft anti-trust trial.
--
Re:Rambus, Patents, and Antitrust in the US (Score:1)
--
Re:Maybe this cloud has a shinny lining (Score:2)
Another note is that at least in Intel's version of inplementing dual channel Rambus they reached the same 'wire count' or close to what you have with a single channel of SDRAM (either normal or DDR as that doens't change). So obviously something else is increasing that count that we don't know of.
The price difference has alot to do with the manufacturing techniques required to make RDRAM & offsets the 'gain' from reducing the bus to 16 bit & then some. The shear cost to manufacturer even at optimal levels is huge for RDRAM (at a best case it woudl be twice normal SDRAM).
Rambus as at best a medicore technology that really we could do without, but did finally spur memory makers to come out with DDR which was adressed when they first started working on the SDRAM standard in the early 90's.
What is going on here? (Score:1)
How did Rambus get patents on technologies required for all forms of memory produced today? Did they actually shell out the R&D to develop them? If so, it seems reasonable that they be rewarded with a return on their investment. Conversely, if not, their patent ought to be reviewed.
Does Rambus really plan to use the licensing fees to kill a better technology (SDRAM)? If so, why? Wouldn't it make more business sense to just go with the better technology and milk it for marginal license fees? That means high volume and lots of cuts.
Re:Where's the DOJ now? (Score:3)
This is, of course, factually incorrect on the part of the gentleman from Intel. Clean room reimplementations of a technology are a great way of evading copyright and trade secret laws, but they do nothing for patents - reinventing patented technology will still see you paying the patent owner, even if you can prove that you'd never heard of the patent or consulted it during the invention phase.
The only way around a patent is to design a different mechanism that has the same outcome; not so much reinventing the wheel as discarding the wheel in favour of the catipillar track. The problem with this is that in the modern era of loosely written patents, it's almost impossible, since patents usually cover enough ground to prevent alternate mechanisms, or patent the outcome itself.
Moreover, you'd probably end up with a technology different enough it wouldn't be business competitive - requiring different motherboards, etc.
Re:Quit your whining! (Score:1)
The really crappy thing is that Toshiba decided to settle without a fight. But that's not too bad yet. So far no US company decided to cave, and Micron has already said they'll fight. The Toshiba's "licencing" will have no relevance if/when they do take it to court. Also, only one court case will be enough to completely ivalidate Rambus's "patents".
Anyway, next time check your facts instead pulling nonsence out of your ass.
___
Re:What is going on here? (Score:1)
Bob
Spy-versus-Spy Fu? (Score:2)
Can you really just pick some subset of these out and call them "good competition", and pick out some other subset and call them bad?
I am reminded of my old MUD days, or even now what I've heard about Everquest or Ultima Online. You could imagine that your character is good simply because of its skill as an entity (strength, kicking ability, etc) and your skills as a meta-entity (kick first, then swing, then charge, etc). But, in the absence of artificial strictures, it doesn't work that way. You can trade items on ebay, you can team up with people in the same room (that is, in the real world) against your enemies (who don't have the advantage of being in the same real room), and so on.
Why should we call "sick your lawyers" move unfair? Isn't it a sign of overall FU in the game of competition?
The nature of competition continues to evolve, as we learn more about competition, as technology evolves (and creates new FU moves). To hearken back to the "good old days" of capitalism (hey, he kicked dirt in my eyes, cheater!) seems silly.
nick
Re:More than 2% (Score:1)
DDR will not be more lucrative for Rambus if they lose the patent battle. The reason they want RDRAM to succeeed over DDR (as they have stated - this isn't my or anyone's else second guess!) is becuse they do have control over the RDRAM patents but it's a lot more unsure whether they'll prevail with SDRAM/DDR. 2% of X is a lot higher than 3-4% of zero.
Re:But RAM prices should be $0.25 per meg! (Score:1)
Re:Every industry survives - sometimes badly. (Score:1)
This could reduce the recycle rate of technology based on unenforced patents - but it could also reduce the sucker rate of cases like this.
Re:Where's the DOJ now? (Score:1)
Re:Sure, let's just trust businesses to play fair (Score:1)
Of course, in Netscape's case, their products were (and STILL are) absolute crap, particularly the browser. It's ironic that the DOJ cited Microsoft giving away the browser, even though Netscape did that for years. Microsoft did screw up their argument, though. They should have argued that a browser is an expected utility in a modern operating system (same as Linux, Be, etc, etc), and they would have won. It was stupid to distract everyone with the "it can't be removed" argument.
Technically, you're wrong. Until Micro$oft forced Nutscrape to make the browser free (IE 3.0, I think), Navigator was /not/ free. You could download a free trial, but if you continued to use it past 30 days, you were legally obligated to shell out to Netscape. That's what forced them to make nav free -- businesses would use IE to avoid paying netscape to make 3000 desktops legal.
The Slashdot Sig Virus
Hey, baby, infect me [3rdrockwarez.com]!
Re:RAMBUS Sucks (Score:2)
Um, no. The recent patent developments mean that RAMBUS stands to earn even more from DDR (And possibly QDR) if it becomes the standard.
Can Rambus possibly be that cocky? (Score:5)
However, I am puzzled by this strategy. For one thing, despite TI's success at defending their patents on fundamental aspects of DRAM (one of many legitimate IC patents they obtained in the early days of IC manufacturing), RAMBUS must know that there is prior art that weakens their claim. While exisiting licensees would arguably tend to support (or stand idly by) as they pressed others to license their technology, cockily taking on an entire industry in this manner is just begging for a barrage of assualts on the patent itself.
I can't believe they would be so blind, even in the heady glee of being gran such ridiculously broad patents like #6,067,592 System having a synchronous memory device [164.195.100.11] [May 23, 3000] and #6,049,846 Integrated circuit having memory which synchronously samples information with respect to external clock signals [164.195.100.11]
In fact, I think we have a duty to use the accumulated experience of our older (and much underappreciated) readers to start picking off the more outrageous patent claims one by one.
The easier we make it for the remaining memory companies to see their options, the better for *us*
To save you some work, here's a partial list of active Rambus patents (and linked to each of the patents themselves [164.195.100.11]). It's not a complete list (IANAPA), but it should save everyone some work getting started. See anything that looks familiar from "way back when"?
1. 6,075,743 [slashdot.org]. Method and apparatus for sharing sense amplifiers between memory banks [slashdot.org]
2. 6,075,730 [slashdot.org]. High performance cost optimized memory with delayed memory writes [slashdot.org]
3. 6,070,222 [slashdot.org]. Synchronous memory device having identification register [slashdot.org]
4. 6,067,592 [slashdot.org]. System having a synchronous memory device [slashdot.org]
5. 6,049,846 [slashdot.org]. Integrated circuit having memory which synchronously samples information with respect to external clock signals [slashdot.org]
6. 6,044,426 [slashdot.org]. Memory system having memory devices each including a programmable internal register [slashdot.org]
7. 6,038,195 [slashdot.org]. Synchronous memory device having a delay time register and method of operating same [slashdot.org]
8. 6,035,369 [slashdot.org]. Method and apparatus for providing a memory with write enable information [slashdot.org]
9. 6,035,365 [slashdot.org]. Dual clocked synchronous memory device having a delay time register and method of operating same [slashdot.org]
10. 6,034,918 [slashdot.org]. Method of operating a memory having a variable data output length and a programmable register [slashdot.org]
11. 6,032,215 [slashdot.org]. Synchronous memory device utilizing two external clocks [slashdot.org]
12. 6,032,214 [slashdot.org]. Method of operating a synchronous memory device having a variable data output length [slashdot.org]
13. 6,021,076 [slashdot.org]. Apparatus and method for thermal regulation in memory subsystems [slashdot.org]
14. 5,995,443 [slashdot.org]. Synchronous memory device [slashdot.org]
15. 5,966,731 [slashdot.org]. Protocol for communication with dynamic memory [slashdot.org]
16. 5,956,284 [slashdot.org]. Method and apparatus for writing to memory components [slashdot.org]
17. 5,954,804 [slashdot.org]. Synchronous memory device having an internal register [slashdot.org]
18. 5,953,263 [slashdot.org]. Synchronous memory device having a programmable register and method of controlling same [slashdot.org]
19. 5,940,340 [slashdot.org]. Method and apparatus for writing to memory components [slashdot.org]
20. 5,928,343 [slashdot.org]. Memory module having memory devices containing internal device ID registers and method of initializing same [slashdot.org]
21. 5,913,046 [slashdot.org]. Protocol for communication with dynamic memory [slashdot.org]
22. 5,896,545 [slashdot.org]. Transmitting memory requests for multiple block format memory operations the requests comprising count information, a mask, and a second mask [slashdot.org]
23. 5,872,996 [slashdot.org]. Method and apparatus for transmitting memory requests by transmitting portions of count data in adjacent words of a packet [slashdot.org]
24. 5,844,855 [slashdot.org]. Method and apparatus for writing to memory components [slashdot.org]
25. 5,748,914 [slashdot.org]. Protocol for communication with dynamic memory [slashdot.org]
26. 5,748,554 [slashdot.org]. Memory and method for sensing sub-groups of memory elements [slashdot.org]
27. 5,680,361 [slashdot.org]. Method and apparatus for writing to memory components [slashdot.org]
28. 5,657,481 [slashdot.org]. Memory device with a phase locked loop circuitry [slashdot.org]
29. 5,606,717 [slashdot.org]. Memory circuitry having bus interface for receiving information in packets and access time registers [slashdot.org]
30. 5,511,024 [slashdot.org]. Dynamic random access memory system [slashdot.org]
31. 5,499,385 [slashdot.org]. Method for accessing and transmitting data to/from a memory in packets [slashdot.org]
32. 5,499,355 [slashdot.org]. Prefetching into a cache to minimize main memory access time and cache size in a computer system [slashdot.org]
33. 5,434,817 [slashdot.org]. Dynamic random access memory system [slashdot.org]
34. 5,430,676 [slashdot.org]. Dynamic random access memory system [slashdot.org]
35. 5,390,308 [slashdot.org]. Method and apparatus for address mapping of dynamic random access memory [slashdot.org]
Re:Just like gas. Patent holders (OPEC) set prices (Score:2)
Someone want to tell me why a consortium like OPEC is illegal in the US and the EU, yet we allow the patent holding cartels do exactly the same thing and call it "Intellectual Property Rights".
Because the Constitution says so? "The Congress shall have Power ... To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", US Consistitution, Artile 1, Section 8, Clause 8.
The right to charge whatever the hell you want to for a limited time for thing you invented is a _constitutionally_ granted right. Only the most ultra-liberal, anti-American, and government-loving people would argue against this.
Time for another gov't probe/crackdown.
Ah yes, the tired old Slashdot line: "The government will come and and fixe\ everything! We love the government! Let's make the government really, really, really big and really, really, really powerful and have total control over all of the Big Evil Corporations. The government does nothing but good for us! We're Slashdot so we're really liberal and we love the government to take care of us! We like to spit on the constitution on burn it because we hate individuals rights so much!" Morons.
No recent news at SLDRAM site (Score:2)
Right, folks. We know it is harmful to consumers a (Score:1)
The URL's for the DoJ's antitrust dept are: http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/contact/emails.htm [usdoj.gov] and http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/contact/newca se.htm [usdoj.gov]
- the first is general contact email addresses, the second is for new cases.
I am sending my first email to the newcases officeand I'm not even American - send yours now, too, or they will ignore it till it is too late.
Re:Going after ms like they should (Score:1)
Rambus does have a percieved lock on the market going forward but this perception does not translate into revenue streams untill they execute (which remains to be seen). As an example, in 1995 Netscape Comunications once had a percieved lock on the direction of internet technologies going forward. When they began to execute that percieved strong position, they drew the ire of a monopolist who pulled the rug out from under them.
Rambus could draw the ire of big Lou at Big Blue to enter into the RAM space and pull the rug out from under them. Anything is posible.
___
But there has been a *lot* of investment in SDRAM (Score:2)
In 1993 the royalties that a memory manufacturer would be willing to pay must be far less than today, since the cost of switching technologies is much higher now.
As with the BT 'weblink patent' this is another case of waiting years until a technology is widely adopted before trying to defend any (supposed) patent violations. If these patents were known about 5+ years ago, more companies could afford to risk loosing in a court battle and/or the technologies in question may not have become as popular as they are today. After all, hidden licencing costs can't be affected by market forces.
We really do need some sort of statute of limmitations on patent violation suits. If you have to defend trademark infrigement or risk losing your trademark, why not patents? Of course, it would help if patents could be processed a bit quicker, too.
I also wonder about the chances of future open hardware standards. Since SDRAM was developed as a standard and Rambus had participated in the early standards definition (along w/ all the memory companies), companies might be a bit reluctant to work towards open standards in the future. Could Rambus have suggested use of, as an example, using both sides of the clock tick, knowing that they had a patent for it in the works?
From an IP standpoint, propriatary, closed hardware seems much safer than taking chances with the national lottery we call the US patent office
Re:Episode 1 (Score:1)
Re:Sure, let's just trust businesses to play fair (Score:1)
Russian anekdote (Score:1)
Son to Mon (hopefully): Will Pop drink less now?
Mom: No, you will eat less now.
Remember GIF case? (Score:1)
Can we do a Microsoft to them? (Score:1)
Funny....to think if Microsoft does similar things, it is bombarded with lawsuits. Then, what about these people?
Oh dear (Score:3)
--Remove SPAM from my address to mail me
Re:Just like gas. Patent holders (OPEC) set prices (Score:1)
Petition Style Web Site? (Score:1)
It could be real simple, type in your name, click a button, and a letter is sent to USPTO saying we are not down with this patent (Kind of like a petition). If we want patent reform, we are going to have to make this know to USPTO.
(PS this could also be setup for other patents) (PPS www.patentbuster.com has been taken.)
And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell! (Score:1)
What really happened? Prices went up instead. For a while businesses claimed it was due to transitional costs in changing over to the GST, and as public outrage faded, it simply never got mentioned again. We elected a national government based on their promise to rid us of the GST, and thanks to big business lobbying, nothing has happened.
This is simply the way capitalist businesses act - get used to it.
Re:Quit your whining! (Score:1)
random access money (Score:1)
ohhh soon us aussies have a GST to make it even more expensive
specially when it seems to blow up half the time,
do u ever get the feeling that you want to post..but really have nothing intresting to say ?
so u make crappy posts like this!
Combatting shortages (Score:1)
Re:Big deal (Score:1)
It's happened before, and it'll happen again.
Well, it may suck for us . . . (Score:1)
.
Re:Oh dear (Score:3)
Exactly.
RDRAM, SDRAM, DDRAM are not the only technologies around. There is a whole lot os technoilogies circulating around Big Blue, Big Q and other not so big companies for their Big and not so Big boxen. For now these technologies cost Big Bucks. But this is for now as they are not manufactured in big enough quantities.
Rambus with its "milk the cow with a vacuum pump until it bleeds" behaviour is asking for these technologies to be brought to the PC market. And it does not have any IP there whatsoever.
The only problem is that this will take time and cost money that will come out of the consumer pocket. And all this because Hitachi did the favourite "japanese corp versus american in court" and chikened out. I hate japs when they do this. It had a perfect case (IANAL) with a list of violations of all kinds of regulations by RAMBUS.
There is some hope, though as price-fixing is a serious offence in EU for example and the EU comission has been amazingly fast recently on quite a lot of cases (like MCI/Sprint merger).
Re:Capitalism and its bastard offspring (Score:1)
Alan Cox joked that it was in fact an EU conspiracy to place a stupidity tax on the US. I'm beginning to think he's right.
More than 2% (Score:2)
Agreed that a 3 or 4% licencing fee won't make DDR anywhere near as expensize as RDRAM, and even if they were the same cost DDR is still the higher performance solution. Still, the arrogance of Rambus feeling free to admit they are trying to subvert technical excellence with licencing fees is pretty disgusting!
Maybe this cloud has a shinny lining (Score:4)
Case 1: Rambus doesn't do an Apple and raise the price of licenses to shut out competition. SDRAM will remain the memory of choice for a while. Intel will deminish support for it ( more mishaps with i820, etc ) SDRAM begins to go the way of EDO. DDR-SDRAM is expensive because it doesn't have a wide support base. The rift in memory market-share allows RAMBUS to market RDRAM as server memory: low-volume, high price. Thus the consumer is faced with either cheap, yet antiquated memory or expensive memory. New memory technologies ( which have been trying to emerge ) do not get a chance because the rift in memory markets and chipset support will be hurting.
Case 2: Intel does as is currently projected. DDR-SDRAM becomes comparible to RDRAM in total value. RDRAM is going to win out, as far as I can tell. Intel is most likely only going to support RDRAM, so the market for DDR will be too small to really hit critical mass. I speculate that RDRAM is actually faster then DDR ( especially under heavy concurrent access, such as truely utilized AGP and SMP ). To my knowledge, DDR only ups the speed of the interface, the underlying technology is not significantely different than that of SDRAM ( much like ATA66 or SCSI 100). With this RDRAM will become mainstream, espeically as CPU's break the 1GHZ barrier ( more speculation on my part, based on the starvation of CPU on both memory latency and bandwidth. Of which RDRAM addresses BW. DDR mildly addresses latency ( wrt RDRAM ) and provides BW ( though only superficially ) ). In the medium run, cheaper RDRAM is going to help a lot of power-hungry people ( though probably not as much as it will hurt intro and intermediate-level system purchasers )
Case 3: RAMBUS blatently prohibitively prices DDR-SDRAM. Now SDRAM and RDRAM are the only real players for PCs. What happens here is that RDRAM production can really begin ramping up to critical mass quickly because there is less uncertainty about the future. Prices will drop quickly over time ( though no where near SDRAM prices ). This is exactly what Intel would want. Their low-cost Celeron systems are perfectly suited for 66MHZ SDRAM. If you're an intro system, why would you bother with high-perf memory. Previously the blur between 66 and 100 allowed people to over-clock the external celeron bus. Now there is a world of difference between celeron and their "workstation-class" systems which come at a significant premium. SDRAM will either become cheap or expensive in the medium run ( lower volume production might mean higher prices if demand is sufficiently high. A typical sinario would be over-stocking of ?SDRAM causes prices to plummet, which prompts massive volume reduction, which later causes prices to go through the roof ( where it will stay ) ). Thankfully I don't think SDRAM demand will tank, so it should stay relatively normal for a while. Now here is the good part. There will now be a massive rift between the expensive ( though significant less than today ) RDRAM and the SDRAM. Hard core gamers, most servers and many desk-tops are going to opt for RDRAM. Most value-PCs are going to opt for SDRAM, but those value-conscious hard-core people ( like myself ) are still going to have demand for something inbetween. And perhaps there is a better compromise between latency and BW in a newer technology ( I read memory technologies a while ago about multi-row caching via SRAM which seems an intelligent approach which is compatible with most interfaces )
Basically I'm saying that those who demand performance are going to benifit from the demise of DDR because it'll ultimately be cheaper for them. Those that are on a budget are going to see minimal increases in their low-end memory ( assuming things don't gyrate too wildly ). And those of us looking for an overall better solution might find solace in a new technology that fills this important niche.
In the long run, I think this has good consequences ( if you ignore the whole moral imperative of stifling competition, which we can't really effect here ). In the short run it doesn't really even affect me ( being an AMD person ). It is only the medium run that has issues ( I wonder if I can hold off purchasing another computer for 2 or 3 years ).
-Michael
Re:Can Rambus possibly be that cocky? (Score:1)
4. 6,067,592. Read the rest of this comment...
Heh, I guess Slashdot could be in violation of a patent every time someone posts a long comment
Not exactly... (Score:1)
What about Microsoft? They've been doing crap like this for fifteen years, and it hasn't been till now that the DOJ's cracked down on them (sure, they've been through the courts before, but when you got plenty of $$$, they aren't a problem). Intel has also been doing it too...
...in fact, you really have to wonder if RAMBUS is doing all this on its own, or if Intel's also a major player. Remember, AMD's really growing in the market with their faster chips. Being as how Intel's loosing big-time with their 8xx chipsets, they really need to stop DDR RAM. I'm sure they've seen the performance results that the GeForce GTS video card has gotten with DDR, and they know that they're gonna get nailed real hard if they don't do anything about DDR. They got both billions of dollars in stock options as well as their processors on the line with RAMBUS, so they have plenty of incentive as well.
At least micron hasnt caved yet.. (Score:3)
Re:Capitalism and its bastard offspring (Score:1)
How companies report 'profits' sucks ass. Say a company made 10 million in profit last year. This year they make 9 million in profit, and have the nerve to say that they 'lost money', and need to cut jobs and/or raise prices.
Look at gas stations in an area. Rarely will you find different gas stations charging different (or significantly different) prices on gasoline. This is price fixing. It doesn't take a meeting in a cigar filled room for it to happen.
Capitalism has been bastardized. it's not the system, it's the people running the system, and they need a kick in the teeth.
Unfortunately capitalism like communism is doomed to failure. Another experiment down the tube.
Industry Survival? (Score:2)
Crime & Punishment ;-) (Score:1)
Good example: NT IS NOT Windows. It is DEC VMS. At some point Bill Gates got Dave Cuttler and another 20-50 engineers from DEC. Does it mean that he would be entitled to all patents related to the OS (if they would exist) ???
Current system is not exactly right, but your proposal would increase the expenses for the companies tenfold. Really, why spend money on lawyers and defend yourself when you can hire the patentholder from the company that is suing you ??? It looks like the crazy mix of bribery and prostitution though, and believe me, not every inventor will have enough integrity to repel the temptations of easy money.
You also should not forget that the existence of many companies (even the big ones) is related to the IP they have.
As for Rambus & other ones like that, I'd put a cap on royalties for these "IP shacks" and reduce the time span of their patents.
Re:what? (Score:1)
Then through market-wrangling, and some minor innovation, those cheap PCs got enough horsepower to be "good enough" for enough applications, and got enough marketshare for critical mass to draw away developers, and it looked like, the commodity hardware solution was a viable alternative to the overpriced proprietary platforms of the past.
Now it looks like Intel wants their machine to become an overpriced proprietary platform. It took them 20 years to get to this point, but they have a captive market, most competitors are dead or dying, and Intel through Microsoft has locked-down the software market, and through Rambus, and other moves (musical CPU slot-specs, AGP, laughably lame USB), is trying to transform the once cheap commodity hardware solution into an extremely expensive "good enough" proprietary platform. And Microsoft was really a disposable pawn in the game, because Intel has demonstrated that they can be replaced: BeOS, Linux, and 5 years ago, they could have done it through OS/2 if they had chosen a comfier relationship with IBM - but IBM was a competitor in the HW space, so no luck there.
I'm trying to work out how PPC didn't make much headway in terms of knocking Intel off the hill - and it gets very conspiracy-ish: Intel had Bill Gates use a mind-control-ray on Steve Jobs to kill cloning, and the CHiRP platform, back at the time of the MS-Office for Mac extortion, and also, got Bill Walker hired on at Motorola as a Mole to destroy PPC as a potential mainstream CPU. I'm not sure what Bill Walker's motivation was, perhaps it involved young boys?
Anyway, the PC-era is dying, servers are where it's at. In 5 years, we're all going to be typing on
Perhaps this is the plan for eliminating online music piracy as well.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Abuses are pretty rare, too. (Score:2)
For the most part, folks really don't slam down hundreds of thousands of dollars to litigate a losing case, even to beat up on a littler guy. Once you show them that you can hurt them, they go away. Really, they do.
I did have one case that went way further than it should have gone -- and it hurt the Plaintiff more than helped him. The rest of the industry in question ended up backing the little guy, and we ended up with so strong a position that they ultimately settled by offering my client (the defendant) $100,000 and fees to agree to let the Plaintiff drop its case.
So, in the end, the system works OK. The reason there isn't much need for additional litigation is that bullshit patents are generally ignored, close patents are rarely asserted on cost/benefit, and other patents SHOULD be asserted -- that's how we resolve these kinds of disputes in the U.S.
Re:A larger problem (Score:1)
Re:Just like gas. Patent holders (OPEC) set prices (Score:1)
Re:Petition Style Web Site? (Score:1)
Re:Petition Style Web Site? (Score:1)
Re:And if you believe that, I have a bridge to sel (Score:1)
I am used to it, too. I come from New Zealand and over there GST has been around for at least 10 years.
Don't worry--US memmakers will fight and win... (Score:2)
Re:More than 2% (Score:1)
As I've already stated in other posts, if all they can do is influence Hitachi and Toshiba, that isn't enough to affect pricing or volumes significantly. Just look at the price of SDRAM at source recently. It's lept by a huge ammount, it may hit 100% price increase that hasn't translated to anything near the kind of a price hike predicted at the hands of Rambus royalties. The simple fact is this whole theory is baseless. Even if Rambus charged huge royalties it still wouldn't make SDRAM significantly less competitive against RDRAM. It isn't driven by the royalties they charge, it's driven by the volumes it's made in.
This whole story is a lot of nonsense.
Re:what? (Score:1)
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
Re:Sure, let's just trust businesses to play fair (Score:1)
I've never heard anyone say Linux is a viable alternative as a desktop OS, just that it will be. And it is a viable alternative, a better alternative in many circumstances, as a server-- but that's not where MS has a monopoly.
And even though there are alternatives, that does not mean one can not be a monopoly. They have monopoly power, and that's all that matters.
Here's my [radiks.net] DeCSS mirror. Where's yours?
A possible solution (to: A larger problem) (Score:2)
I also know the downside. When I was in the University, they got 50% on profits from any patents I might have gotten in the line of sponsered research. (Of course, if it was sponsered, with the people I was working under, it wouldn't have been mine at all. Hence, no patent work there. Maybe if I get back into academia somewhere else...) Now, working in industry, I'm vulnerable to corporate lawyers' interpretations of "related research"... let me tell you, that sucks. Worse, if it was something I wanted to, say, GPL, and not part of paid work effort... I'd be fighting a legal battle over something I should rightfully have full rights to.
What I propose, for the good of the high-tech industries, the engineers, and the scientists, is this:
Patents are owned by the person who takes them out. They can be licenced and distributed by a company that contracts them for a period significantly less than the duration of the patent, but ownership reverts to the individual(s) responsible for the patent. The licencing rights are not salable except with consent of their owner(s). Patent licensing rights can be negotiated for before the research takes place, but all rights are not licensable by a blanket clause on employment, save in the case of official thinktank hires (with the current rules for thinktank employment, IE free direction clauses, partial royalty rights, etc still in effect), and exempt employment does not mean own-time work is still in the employ of the signer of paychecks.
Add to this a reform of patent office hiring and training, patent fees, and generality of patents (no vague patents should be binding, I'm sorry... likewise, patents should not be granted for general systems. I'm all for algorithm patents, engineering patents, or process patents. I'm also for unordered process patents (Do A then B, and follow C D and F, in any order), but I'm seriously discusted by system patents. They practically insure vagueness.
What's the international law on patents? (Score:1)
So does anybody know how patent laws carry? thanks.
Remember when they said prices would skyrocket? (Score:1)
Re:Can Rambus possibly be that cocky? (Score:1)
A larger problem (Score:5)
Of course sometimes companies had no Patent portfolio to cross license, and were forced to pay royalties. However, being producers themselves, the patent holders couldn't charge too much; corporate 'karma' prevented it - after all if they charged predatory royalties - somebody could do the same things to them.
Rambus on the other hand produces NOTHING; they exist only as a shell firm with a PR department, a legal department, a portfolio of patents, and little else. Because they produce nothing, companies like Rambus are not subject to cross licensing, and corporate 'karma' has no effect on them. The result is that a Rambus style firm is free to gouge on their royalty demands. The only thing which limits them is the threat of a counter suits by deep pocketed memory producers with the object of invalidating the Patents.
In effect companies like Rambus have the moral stature of email spam; both are a parasitic drain on a system which tends to hamper the productive.
I think that we are only seeing the tip of the Rambus future. Because Rambus makes nothing, their 'cost of goods sold' is zero; at least Microsoft has to pay for the blank CD's that they press. Thus, minus their expenses, everything that Rambus takes in is gravy. One of the things that I expect them to do in the future is use their money to acquire additional patents to suck even more blood out of the economy.
It is no accident that both spam and productionless, patent holding companies were dreamed up by lawyers. Neither is an approach that productive people would think of.
Is there a solution to parasitic patent behavior? I think that there is. In the United States patents can only be granted to individuals, NO COMPANY HAS EVER BEEN GRANTED A PATENT ON ANYTHING. Companies obtain patents by having them assigned to them. This is typically done by means of employment contracts which force inventors to assign their patent rights to the corporation. This puts into effect the first layer of parasitic behavior. Most abuse of the patent system occurs because of the assignment process; if the law were changed so that only an INDIVIDUAL could own a patent - as well as be granted one - most of the parasitic and bad consequences of the patent system would disappear.
Every industry survives - sometimes badly. (Score:1)
Besides which, patent concerns are for now, and the foreseeable future, not something that will go away.
To talk about devices without patent concerns is optimistic.. If they don't have them at first, someone will do what Rambus Inc. is doing, and we will have the same situation again - at the cost to the little people.
While I would like to agree about innovation overcoming any obstacle, it can, IMHO, only do so in a relatively competitive field - hence having to be proactive against certain OS / Office-app. producers, and possibly with the likes of Rambus Inc. too
NB - Cynicism is sophistication. Sophism doesn't work... I still like the sig though.
inferior technology (Score:1)
Re:More than 2% (Score:1)
On the issue of Rambus' memory IP, if the advantages were unimportant, the memory manufacturers would eschew them and escape the royalties. Your rhetoric on the standards committee is lifted straight from the Hitachi countersuit against Rambus which has now been dropped like a stone. In fact you didn't get it quite right (maybe you got Dr Tom's contorted version of the facts), because one of the things that Hitachi also claimed was that Rambus should have disclosed their existing patents when they joined the group. This would have given them forewarning to demand free use or perhaps to steer around the technology. Any way you look at it this was a desperate ploy by Hitachi and had a snowballs chance in hell of working in court. You could claim they dropped the suit to help sell the business but the truth is that Hitachi were crapping themselves at the prospect of losing their shirt on this. The memory business is booming right now (they can't make enough of the stuff and prices are rocketing) and they can't have been in any hurry to sell, that's just more smoke.
So which of us actually knows what they're talking about? I think I have my facts straight.
Re:Whatever happened to ESDRAM and SLDRAM? (Score:1)
Re:Big deal (Score:1)
Time for the master to check his reality.
Some clarifications (Score:3)
The fact that RDRAM has a higher latency than SDRAM will become less and less important as CPU caches increase in size - this will mean larger chunks of memory will be copied into the cache at a time, making bandwidth the bottleneck instead of the latency.
The signallig problem is called bus skew and basically has to do with synchronizing at high speed. It might sound ridiculous, but when you have signals moving across a bus at 800+MHz, pin 0 could already be sending its n+1th bit when pin 15 is still waiting for bit n. This means you have to be absolutely certain your timing is perfect, because adding circuits to fix these problems will only slow things down again (defeating the point of a high speed bus.) This is something SDRAM will run into sooner or later as well though and the problem is much worse with 64 pins.
The yields are currently very bad because you have to assemble a RIMM entirely before you can test them. This means that if you have 1 chip that doesn't work, you can throw away the entire RIMM. Some calculating shows that in a situation like that, 90% yields in chips will only mean about 50% yield in RIMMs. This is probably just a matter of time though, before someone figures out a way to test them without assembling the entire RIMM first.
In the long run, I think Rambus could have a really interesting technology, but the way they try to force it onto everybody and demanding licensing fees and royalties, it will be hard to convince people... The company sucks and will probably drag down the technology with it.
Re:Where's the DOJ now? (Score:2)
Maybe we should ask the Democratic party (and socialists of all stripes) why they think the federal government is smart enough to micromanage the economy?
What frightens me is that you think the government should be MORE intrusive into the free market. You couch your arguments into "pro-competition" terms, but when government steps in and starts picking winners and losers (i.e., anti-trust law), that is not pro-competition.
I will agree, however, that some of the laws being passed are not particularly good for consumers, more government intervention is not the answer. Government is a blunt instrument, and should only be used in the most extreme cases (and Microsoft is really pretty borderline). Microsoft is a piker compared to how powerful Standard Oil was.
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Re:Where's the DOJ now? (Score:2)
legal restrictions on monopolies. Read some basic economics before
saying that anti-trust law is anti-competition.
Re:A larger problem (Score:2)
The problem with your statement is that afaik almost all inventions (the high-tech ones, anyway), are not solely the credit of an individual, but of research teams funded by companies.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Re:what? (Score:3)
As a second point, I would like to thank you for not producing a flame, but instead being insightful.
With that said, I'll have to disagree with you and stick with my original comments. I do not believe that your agument holds.
First, my choice of the word speculation was not an admission of ignorance, but more a disclaimer saying that I do not have definitive evidence. Nor am I trying to prove a point based on the speculation, so it really matters little. Notice that my point was not that we're all going to be better off if RDRAM is our only choice, so long as it gets cheaper. But that, of the many ways that this situation can go, RDRAM will most likely become cheaper. Which will, in turn, help period. There is a possibility that this will backfire on RAMBUS / Intel in the creation of a nich for someone else to fulfill ( and ideally free us of memory woes ) which was the whole "shiny lining" that the article was about.
As for your comment about the "PROVEN" superiority of SDRAM. I would like to challenge you or ANYONE to verify this. I have a personal pet pieve about the word proven.. Anyone that uses it is put into a catagory in my mind; nothing in life is for certain or proven. Evidence is not proof of something, but only support of it's concept. I get tired of using the phrase, "the world was once proven to be flat because all _known_ evidence supported it".
As for SDRAM and RDRAM, I read Toms Hardware, Anandtech and Sharky Extreme. Yes, there have been benchmarks that showed SDRAM in the lead, but I have ALSO seen benchmarks by them that say the opposite. I really don't feel like digging it up, you can either take my word for it, or go research it yourself. I'm sure their articles are well marked. I'd be curious to learn of your findings. Additionally, almost all their benchmarks are on single CPU configurations, which is NOT the theoretical target of RDRAM. The stated design goals of RDRAM revolve around multiple simultaneous access; something not very well supported by existing single CPU systems. Intel's Italium is completely based on massively concurrent access. AGP is theoretically bassed around this as well ( though I do not think much aside from the failed intel 740 card ( or possibly even the i810 chipset ) makes full use of the concurrent bandwidth ( by among other things masking the latency ) ). My use of the word speculation is because I have not yet seen ANY benchmarks that test this theory. Provide a fully speced out AGP and SMP configuration then directly compare SDRAM ( and DDR for that matter ) with RDRAM, then one will be able to comment for or against my claim. I speculate primarily on the theory ( which I know can not be used as a basises for an argument, but again, that wasn't my main point in the argument ). Once again, I HAVE actually seen numbers that put RDRAM based systems ahead of others ( they were topping out the scores ). Thus, if you are paying top-dollar for a system, then I believe that your best bet at the moment is an RDRAM system.
As for DDR-SDRAM, I admit ignorance on the details. I've only read pices here and there, and don't even remember if I've seen any benchmarks on it. I do however remember that it's main call-to-fame is the double-transmittion ( rising/falling-edge transmission ) which we've come to know and love for the past two or three years. The main advancement here is NOT that they've created faster memory, but that they've learned how to transmit higher frequencies over longer distances. High freq. over the length of a motherboard will introduce lots of noise, and will drain a lot of power. By taking the same signal and getting twice as much data out of it, you're essentially getting something for nothing. A true advancement in technology. I made the comparison to ATA66 which allows maximum data-transfer rates to be un-hindered, but there is NO harddrive today that I have ever heard of that can transmit 66Meg/second continuously. This is primarily for use with cache bursts. Write 2 meg to the drive quickly, so that you can allow the second device to read. It stays in the drive's cache until it can be committed to disk at a more realistic 8 Meg / second. Upping the bandwidth allows improved latency by getting info to and from the device quicker. It works best under heavily loaded situations ( moreso in SCSI than in IDE however ). Likewise, DDR-SDRAM will allow addresses and writes to be transmitted more quickly, and thereby freeing up the bus for additional operations. However, this does not say anything about the memory's ability to sequentially process it. To my knowledge, we're still dealing with plain old, old-school memory access, though in a slightly more pipelined fashion. Concurrent access is not addressed by this technology. Theoretically, the mem-controller could rearrange memory accesses to maximize locality ( as would a SCSI controller ), but this does not garuntee throughput. RDRAM's use of independent channels can ( note: this is speculation based on the theory ) allow, under most circumstances, greater bandwidth provided critical mass of concurrent access. As we've seen, this critical mass is not zero. There are obviously situations where SDRAM _has_ outperformed RDRAM. The race, however, is closer with slower CPU speeds than with faster. And in case I somehow didn't make my point strong enough, the _theory_ only take hold after a critical mass of concurrent access is achieved. RDRAM has a massive drawback in terms of latency, so it's curve starts off with a handicap. The fact that it can outperform under extremely heavy-loads "suggests" ( here's that whole using evidence to prove, or shoud I say support a case ), that the trend should continue with ever faster machines.
The theory suggests that only server-class machines ( having multiple concurrent processes ) will fully take advantage of RDRAM. This is the whole Pentium Pro argument of 32 v.s. 16 bit code. The situation back then was not well suited for 32 bit code, and they just happened to suck at 16 bit code so benchmarks could really ream the PPro. All in all, however, it was a superior architecture. The concept of RDRAM is more advanced than SDRAM ( I think this can go unquestioned ). The real question is whether the drawbacks from the more complex technology outweight the advances IN A SERVER. I highly doubt Intel will not market RDRAM for laptops or value-PCs for this very reason. I am a very theory / principle based person, so I believe that the evidence supports my case, but I can not say this with any real amount of certainty because I have not seen benchmarks that test the theory properly.
Lastly, I fully admit that my theory biases me; I am not an authority on the matter. I am reading into some benchmarks. But again, this has nothing to do with the point in my previous article.
Re:Just like gas. Patent holders (OPEC) set prices (Score:2)
He didn't say it was right. He said it was the law. And, in fact, it is and has been the law for more than 200 years.
The particular clause your are unfond of here, is no longer the law -- we had to fight a civil war to find out why it shouldn't be.
To suggest that the Constitution, as amended, does not codify American social norms in some sense is wrong-headed. If there was a sea-change in political views, the means exist to amend it. Not only hasn't this ever been proposed for Article I, Section 8 -- that issue has never been on the political scope.
Of course, the fact that the proposition is normative in America, doesn't make it right either. The principles of Patent and Copyright law certainly aren't "right" just because they are in the Constitution.
On the other hand, the fact that they have been organic law of this nation for more than 200 years is highly persuasive. "Get over yourself," while pithy, certainly does not constitute much of an argument to the contrary.
Re:Big deal (Score:2)
I wouldn't call what Apple did 'squeezing'. They placed a $1/port licencing fee if the manufacturer wanted to use the word 'Firewire', rather than IEEE 1394.
$1/port?
Also, Firewire is an open standard. Anyone can make one. In order to even MAKE a Microchannel device, you had to licence it from IBM.
Re:what? (Score:2)
The fact is that even if the performance of RDRAM is better than SDRAM (and it hasn't generally lived up to expectations) there are still plenty of things to not like about RDRAM such as the heat and cost issues. Infact, just about the only thing RDRAM has going for it (in a desktop machine) is the high bandwidth and that advantage is more than nullified by DDR SDRAM.
what? (Score:2)
The author proves he is blindly speculating when he states "I speculate that RDRAM is actually faster then DDR ( especially under heavy concurrent access, such as truely utilized AGP and SMP ). " He even notes he is speculating! RDRAM has already proven to not outperform current SDRAM in real world tests, yet this guy says he thinks it will outperform the next generation DDR, which by definition is 2x the speed of SDRAM!
He would do better to say that it wont matter at all because by then we will all be using internet toasters...
This proves moderators don't even read the stuff they moderate, they simply go for length and amount of HTML in a comment.
NightHawk
Tyranny =Gov. choosing how much power to give the People.
Re:Is RAM really all that expensive? (Score:3)
Presently, both RDRAM and DDRRAM are very expensive. This isn't because of rambus taking lots of royalties. It's because the products are still new, people who buy early are willing to pay extra, they haven't become comodities yet, memory manufactuers still haven't matured their manufacturing and testing to the same extend they have for SDRAM, etc..
So I'm not worried about memory prices soaring due to Rambus. I'm confident that with time prices on RDRAM and DDRRAM will come down.
should be $0.25 per meg! - yeah right (Score:2)
Re:Can Rambus possibly be that cocky? (Score:2)
There are other causes of action (including criminal causes for perjury) if claims are falsely stated in a Patent Application.
I have seen cases where patent owners have been fined and punished for misrepresenting their rights to the public. It's not common, but it does happen.
On the other hand, the vast majority of cases brought to trial are far more reasonable disputes -- cases where both parties have a reasonable argument. (Most cases where the rights are slam-dunk are settled well in advance of trial, let alone appeal).
Re:Maybe this cloud has a shinny lining (Score:5)
You're whole argument is based on the simply untrue assumption that RAMBUS is ultimately a better solution than DDR. Well, I've got news for you: it ain't. The goal behind RAMBUS was to increase bandwidth and lower the pin count. They did both of these things, creating a 800 mhz memory module (actually 400 DDR) that uses a 16 bit bus. This delivers the same bandwidth as 200 mhz SDRAM would, since SDRAM uses a 64 bit bus. However, RAMBUS ran into a LOT of unexpected problems. Let's go over them all:
First of all, there's the whole latency issue. Basically, RAMBUS will always have higher latencies then SDRAM. This is a big part of the reason that RAMBUS can't seem to significantly outperform regular PC133 even though it should have 50% more bandwidth.
Then there's the memory limit issue. As one adds more and more RAMBUS memory, because of signalling issues (which I'll be the first to admit I don't completely understand) it becomes extremely difficult to keep it all working. The end result is that there is currently no way to have more than 512 megs of RAMBUS memory. This simply isn't enough for servers, and because of this even Intel, the big RAMBUS supporter, plans on using DDR memory for the server version of Willamette. It won't be long until 512 isn't enough for the desktop either. Do you really want to be stuck with this limit?
There's also the price issue. RAMBUS was supposed to be cheaper than SDRAM because it uses fewer pins, but things don't always work out the way they're supposed to. RAMBUS yeilds are horrible, and it is unlikely they will ever be as good as SDRAM yeilds. RAMBUS also requires a more expensive packaging and needs its own heatsink to deal with heat issues. The idea of ever putting RAMBUS in a laptop horrifies me. Also, because RAMBUS is yeilding so terribly 800 mhz modules are actually quite rare. Most RAMBUS being made is either 600 or 700 mhz, which compares quite pourly with PC133 considering that the 800 mhz modules can barely outperform it. There are also concerns that RAMBUS might not have much room to grow. Some video cards already use 200 mhz (non-DDR) SDRAM, and although these speeds are not mass-produced yet, the biggest limiting factor is motherboards which support it. SDRAM still has a lot of room to increase its frequency. RAMBUS doesn't.
Of course, during all this I was comparing RAMBUS to regular SDRAM, and RAMBUS doesn't compare very well at all. It wins a few points, but not many. Now, let's compare it to DDR SDRAM. DDR SDRAM is estimated to cost about 3% more to manufacture than regular SDRAM. 3%! RAMBUS costs at least 4-5 times as much! Now, PC2100 (133 mhz DDR, they rate it by the bandwidth and not the frequency for marketing reasons. Probably because they don't want the average consumer to be choosing between PC266 and PC800 not realizing what it means.) will offer more bandwidth than RAMBUS, still have the lower latencies of SDRAM, cost significantly less, and not be limited to 512 megs. Do you really want RAMBUS to win?
Shell corporations (Score:2)
Think about what the market would be like (not just in computers, in general) if the only ones who could get a patent are those who *already* had the capital to produce the result.
It may be annoying and unsportsmanlike for Rambus to swing such agreements on manufacturers, at least if those manufacturers had been led to believe otherswise, but I don't see how inventing things (which doesn't have to involve actually *building* them) can be called intellectual parisitism.
Division of labor is a good thing. The whole reason (theoretically) that we put up with patents at all is to enjoy the fruits of inventors' intellects in the form of ideas they've thought of, in exchange for not infringing upon it for a limited amount of time. Just like authors -- would you insist they self-publish?
timothy
The licensing fees are negligible (Score:2)
Also, I don't think, Rambus will be able to make all DRAM manufacturers pay. The outcome of the lawsuits is anything but certain.
Rambus: Hardware version of Great Satan? (Score:2)
Now its "no one buys our RAM so we'll price-gouge SDRAM"
This is the worst case scenario of "creating a level playing field" - everyone loses but Rambus
Big deal (Score:5)
Even if this manages to survive, all it means is that manufacturers will rush the next generation of memory without patent problems into computers. It's happened before, and it'll happen again. I seem to recall IBM tried to squeeze the industry with Microchannel and Apple tried to squeeze with Firewire. The industry will survive.
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Is RAM really all that expensive? (Score:3)
I can remember when it broke the $100/meg barrier.
I can remember when it broke the $50.meg barrier. I bought four megs of RAM.
Now that it is in the $1/meg range, I bought 128 megs
Thing about what it costs now, and will cost if Rambus succeeds. They will have their day in the spotlight, and then they will be replaced with the next technology.
If they succeed I see DDR staying in th $3-5/meg range for a while, but eventually it will have to come down to compete.
Where's the DOJ now? (Score:4)
No doubt the DOJ will step in 5 years from now after Rambus barely exists and we're on to some new, non sucky, memory type and say "Hey - remember when you were screwing people, well now we're going to get you."
Thanks DOJ. For nuthin'.
hey, there could be a good side to this (Score:2)
Otherwise the minimum standard for Windows NT 6^H^H^H^H2001^H, ummm, I mean Windows
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Patents are e-vile. (Score:3)
Ah, another case of patents promoting the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, eh?
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Rambus, Patents, and Antitrust in the US (Score:3)
About a year ago, the US Federal Circuit (the US court with jurisdiction over patent appeals, answerable only to the US Supreme Court) decided that enforcement of a valid patent can never be an antitrust violation.
The decision was Intergraph v. Intel [emory.edu].
This means the best way to resolve this is finding prior art; one bit of prior art has been found over at technocrat.net [technocrat.net].
-doug
Re:FINALLY! Anti-trust suit that would BENEFIT use (Score:2)
Dana
Re:Where's the DOJ now? (Score:2)
If you want to see real micromanagement of economy then you are welcome to the EU. In the EU the Microsoft trial would be a matter of about 3-4 weeks, and Bill Gates would already sit in jail for lying under oath and criminal contempt of court.
Re:Maybe this cloud has a shinny lining (Score:3)
I'm not fully understanding why there is a memory size limit. I know that you can do 1, 2 and 4 channel RAMBUS configurations. I don't know if it's possible to do more ( seems likely that you should, at least in custom boards ). It would make sence to me that additional channels should be completely independant and therefore there would be no theoretical limit to the size. Thinking in terms of a SUN server where they design them from scratch, only customizing the back-plane, etc. You should be able to make a rack-based server that could have attached memory channels. This would help dessipate the heat ( by seperating them ) and if done in a sufficiently modualar and heirarchical approach, you should be able to have as much memory as you can afford ( at this point, the memory would be the least of your costs ). From what I've read ( mainly on Toms Hardware, and the like ), the timing limitiations are because each chip has to ( at boot time ) figure out the longest possible probagation path and sync itself accordingly. I believe the RDRAMS ( I can't remember from RIMMS, modules, etc ) are kind of daisy chainned, which means that the signal has to probagate through each device on a channel, and therefore the more memory chips you add ( RIMMS I believe ), the slower that channel. There's a max probagation delay that you can achieve, so depending on the setup of the memory modules, there's a max memory size that a channel can hold. I am not aware of any inter-channel dependancy, so you should be able to go as wide as necessary, though this adds incredible expense to the system.
High performance systems, however, tend to spend a lot of money on the memory subsytem. I remember studying the SGI, HP and SUN setups, where you'd have many interleaved channels. It's really just a matter of what becomes the mainstream. And it looks like 1, 2 and 4 will be it ( just like 1, 2 and 4 CPU configurations ). I can't imagine that you'd have the same sort of problems with many independent channels as you would many independent CPU's. The only bandwidth you're really fighting over is the inside of the chipset, and you can cheaply splurge there( especially since your wire-count is drastically reduced ). 4 16bit RAMBUS channels shouldn't be many more wires than a single SDRAM channel. I'd be interested in learning more about the limitations though.
Onto some of your other points. The I believe that the RAMBUS guys knew that they'd have latency problems from the start ( not that you made any inference on the matter ). Intel has been working that problem for years. Their solution is making latency tolerant devices. Latency from a slow-responding memory device running at clock speed is no different than fast responding SRAM that's clocked 1/12 of your CPU on average ( since on average you'll have to wait 6 cycles before it can hear you, then you'll have to wait an additional 6 cycles before it can transmit ( even after it has a response ) ). DDR-SDRAM alleviates the problem at least, but as far as I know, it's still pipelined and therefore does not provide the best possible latency. Still, I belive it's significantly less than that of RDRAM so DDR wins this battle.
I must admit a 16bit bus could almost only justify itself if it were cheaper or easier to manufacture. You're needlessly adding delay ( albeit at 800MHZ on an 800MHZ machine, this should be negligable ). The fact that it's so many times more expensive is just an insult to everyone ( though I honestly believe this is an economy of scale, and as with my article, reaching a critical mass would mean signifcantly more affordable system ). As with the above, the real benifit is probably in the ability to multiplex many channels. 4 168pin devices, for example, would be a nightmare to multiplex.
If nothing else, the excessive heat is unbelievable. The design spends great length discussing the idle and sleep modes which are used to keep the devices from overheating!! Those sleep modes wind up causes significant latencies, especially since I've gotten the impression that a given channel can only have 1 active RIMM(?) at a time. Therefore a significantly loaded server is going to be spending almost all it's time RIMM thrashing.
Finally, in response to "do I really want RAMBUS to win". Of course not; my silver-lining was really that we _might_ get another [superior] technology to win out that would not otherwise have gotten a chance. Will RAMBUS be shoved down our throats? Of course. Will people buy into it. Well, they're already doing so ( either by ignorance, or because their particular app is well suited to RAMBUS ). Will I personally ever buy RAMBUS, or would I ever recommend a friend to do so? Not unless all other options are exhasted.. which I guess means, maybe.
-Michael
Re:Where's the DOJ now? (Score:2)
Re:Just like gas. Patent holders (OPEC) set prices (Score:2)
It says _nothing_ about any right to charge what you want for what you claim to have invented. ONLY that congress shall have to power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, through permitting you exclusively to charge for your supposed invention.
The problem is that patents and copyright in the current extreme are so horribly abused that they very likely do not promote invention or the creation of art, but rather hinder it.
And, the constitution does NOT say 'The congress shall have the Power
Re:Can Rambus possibly be that cocky? (Score:2)
The answer is simple. Outright theft. The Register posted an article on Hitachi's response to the Rambus suit. Rambus stole the work of the JEDEC community and patented the information obtained in the meetings.
You can read the article (in two parts) starting at
http://212.113.5.84/content/1/11576.html [212.113.5.84]
Sounds like they took a page from the Microsoft operating manual.
Intel anti-trust round two (Score:2)
Last time around AMD and DEC complained about certain anti-competitive aspects of Intel's behaviour regarding processor patents and other IP. Intel settled and promised to be good, but now they seem to be up to their old tricks again. I can smell another antitrust suit coming.
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Re:Just like gas. Patent holders (OPEC) set prices (Score:2)
If you take the view that what you believe is right, and what you do not is not, then of course the Constitution can not sway you one way or the other.
The Constitution is a consensus instrument, of course, and from that it draws both its persuasive strength and its weaknesses. If the Oracle of Right holds too small a minority view, it is true, the document will not be changed appropriately.
In your supposedly "damning" example, however, this was not the case. Eventually, the majority view did prevail. That may constitute a "might makes right" view, indeed, but such is the nature of majority rule, and of supermajority rule to amend a Constitution. We check that majority right by providing limits, as in the bill of rights, and have faith that the rest will take care of itself.
It may not be the best way, but in truth, I don't know of a better way. I, for one, think the Constitution is a deep, wondrous instrument. Whatever its historical flaws, it seems to have been self-healing over time. As between its dicta, and your undifferentiated assertions as to what is "right," I for one know which is the more persuasive.
You argue against the Constitution by quoting language that has been amended out or rendered legally obsolete. Not the strongest argument, IMHO.
Re:Capitalism and its bastard offspring (Score:5)