Driving the RAM-bus
The Bear Rebuttal

By Rob Landley (TMF Oak)

Yes, Rambus makes fast RAM. But so do SDRAM manufacturers. It all goes back to an understanding of Moore's Law. Rambus didn't beat Moore's Law, it just jumped up the curve to produce very expensive RAM. Instead of producing more bang for the buck ahead of schedule, Rambus allowed customers to throw money at the problem and get their extra performance now, at a price.

The rest of the industry kept doubling performance (or halving the price of performance, take your pick) every 18 months, and eventually caught up with Rambus, leaving Rambus memory still more expensive than the alternative due to its proprietary nature and lower volume.

Rambus will ALWAYS be more expensive than the alternative because of the licensing fees Rambus charges actual silicon manufacturers (who have their own design staff and are quite capable of producing their own commodity SDRAM). Rambus's strategy is to sue competitors until the competing commodity SDRAM is almost as expensive as Rambus memory.

Many of Rambus's "key" patents won't hold up in court. But rather than sue to invalidate each and every patent, the most direct approach is to sue Rambus for antitrust violations, which is what is happening. Rambus is using its patents not to prevent competitors from stealing its ideas, but in a clear attempt to squelch competition by intimidation. Rather than producing a better product (which RDRAM isn't if you look at the price-to-performance ratio), it's threatening companies and their customers with legal action for using obvious and established engineering techniques like edge-triggered interrupts that trigger on both edges. Some of these technologies were contributed by Rambus itself to memory standards bodies, which Rambus then quit shortly before it started suing people. (This is not only a violation of the standards bodies' rules, it's incredibly bad form.)

Strangely enough, companies generally don't take over previously commoditized market niches with sustaining technologies. It's possible with disruptive technologies (read Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma) but not with sustaining ones. IBM couldn't close the PC back up with micro-channel architecture. Commoditization is inherently a disruptive force, attacking the low end and working its way up.

Rambus technology is being bypassed by the market, and Rambus's patent lawsuits are a temper tantrum in reaction to this. Ironically, Rambus protects itself from patent countersuits by not actually manufacturing any of its designs. The companies that license its designs generally already own licenses to the many other patents required to manufacture standard RAM. (Often, they originated them.) How can there be six separate manufacturers with so much patented technology? Because none of them acts as shortsightedly as Rambus.

Intel has been repeatedly burned by Rambus, and Intel isn't stupid. If Rambus memory doesn't help Intel, Intel will eventually stop helping Rambus. Rambus memory isn't enough to make iTanium a viable choice yet; the processor design has many problems (smaller cache and slower clock speed than even many low-end Celeron chips) and will quite possibly be delayed until its successor, McKinley, is ready.

(For a fairly detailed summary of Rambus technology and a little about the company behind it, here's an article from Tom's Hardware.)

No matter how many clever engineers any one company has, the rest of the world combined will always have more. Commodity products will eventually ALWAYS out-evolve proprietary products. This is how Rambus lost its speed lead, and why the company's solutions no longer make sense in the marketplace. Conventional RAM continues to double in performance at a given price level every 18 months, without Rambus. Rambus can't stop it, and it's also proven it can't stay ahead of it.

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 This Week's Duel

  • Introduction
  • The Bull Argument
  • The Bear Argument
  • The Bull Rebuttal
  • The Bear Rebuttal
  • Vote Results
  • Flashback: Berkshire Hathaway

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