[elimc]

Why did it dissapear? Was it too close to the design of RDRAM?

[Saem]

First ask this on RWT. Paul DeMone will likely recant a good history lesson.

From my understanding SLDRAM got canned when DRDRAM got the support by Intel rather than SLDRAM. SLDRAM from my understanding was a more open standard. Paul DeMone works for MOSAID and they were one of the contributing members to the SLDRAM consortium (I think that's the group).

[Entropy]

Originally Posted by Saem

First ask this on RWT. Paul DeMone will likely recant a good history lesson.

From my understanding SLDRAM got canned when DRDRAM got the support by Intel rather than SLDRAM. SLDRAM from my understanding was a more open standard. Paul DeMone works for MOSAID and they were one of the contributing members to the SLDRAM consortium (I think that's the group).

Going from memory, SyncLinkDRAM was developed as alternative to RDRAM intended for JEDEC standardisation in order to avoid RAMBUS Inc. royalties and control. I distinctly recall some vicious name-calling between representatives for the two sides. With Intel backing RDRAM, the other players went on to support inertia (PC133 and DDR) rather than SLDRAM which would have added infra-structure costs similar to those of RDRAM albeit without the royalty costs and control concerns.

Again this is going from memory of old discussions, and I'll echo Saems' recommendation of Paul DeMone as one guy who might actually answer if you ask.

Entropy

[MfA]

Another detail was that on paper RDRAM was faster, of course later RDRAM prooved to not be manufacturable to their paper specs with the processes they promised it on.

[Saem]

I believe this was even brought to attention but supposedly RAMBUS was very good at convincing others that it would be possible. Interestingly enough, during the time when Rambus was making ludicrious promises without much in the way of proof of concept SLDRAM had been demonstrated to work at promised performance levels.

[elimc]

Rambus was running RAM at unheard of speeds in the early nineties. A lot of the stuff SLDRAM relied on was invented by Rambus.

So why would Intel choose Rambus if SLDRAM looked so good?

BTW, could you show me a link to a proof of concept SLDRAM device, Saem? All I've gotten were some distant forcasts before the consortium dissapeared from the radar screen.

[Saem]

Rambus was running RAM at unheard of speeds in the early nineties. A lot of the stuff SLDRAM relied on was invented by Rambus.

IIRC wasn't that in a far from mass production process? I'm not sure how to take the last statement. Is that an invitation to rehash the is Rambus fradulent in it's IP claims or are we talking about explicitly closed IP versus what was open supposed to be JEDEC, in the eyes of JEDEC?

BTW, could you show me a link to a proof of concept SLDRAM device, Saem? All I've gotten were some distant forcasts before the consortium dissapeared from the radar screen.

I remember someone mentioning it. I'll see what I can dig up.

[MfA]

Originally Posted by elimc

So why would Intel choose Rambus

We made a big bet on Rambus and it did not work out. In retrospect, it was a mistake to be dependent on a third party for a technology that gates your performance...We hoped we were partners with a company that would concentrate on technology innovation rather than seeking to collect a toll from other companies

Everyone makes mistakes.

Marco

PS. SLDRAM's signalling technology is usually seen as an extension of SCI.

[elimc]

Everyone makes mistakes.

I don't buy it. 6+ years and millions of dollars were invested into the p4. I don't think they invested into RDRAM for the heck of it. The people who designed the P4s are not morons.

We made a big bet on Rambus and it did not work out. In retrospect, it was a mistake to be dependent on a third party for a technology that gates your performance...We hoped we were partners with a company that would concentrate on technology innovation rather than seeking to collect a toll from other companies

I'm not going to be baited into discussing this.

Out of curiosity, what is your degree in, Marco?

[MfA]

Originally Posted by elimc

I'm not going to be baited into discussing this.

I can understand that you would not believe me when I say everyone can make mistakes, albeit I think its a touch naive to believe otherwise, but if you choose to ignore Craig barret too then I will have to do the same and stop discussing this :( I will just say that these kind of decisions are not solely taken by engineers, and with SLDRAM they could not have bought themselves a competetive "advantage" (well it would have been if RDRAM had been competetive from the get go) through an early alliance like they could with RDRAM.

Out of curiosity, what is your degree in, Marco?

EE.

You are way overselling Rambus's innovations. If Paul Demone's statements are not enough you might want to read the archives from sig-int mailing list and see how impressed experts in the industry have been with Rambus over the years.

I must admit that with yellowstone they seem to be turning it around, quite a sensible design IMO. Though of course in some ways it is closer to SLDRAM than to RDRAM ;)

Marco

[elimc]

I can understand that you would not believe me when I say everyone can make mistakes, albeit I think its a touch naive to believe otherwise, but if you choose to ignore Craig barret too then I will have to do the same and stop discussing this

I believe people make mistakes. I just don't believe that they didn't consider in depth what RAM type to use. The idea is fairly ludicris.

I will just say that these kind of decisions are not solely taken by engineers

Who else would make this kind of decision at Intel?!

EE.

How fast do you think SLDRAM would be at today?

You are way overselling Rambus's innovations.

Some things I know about Rambus (or think I know)

1) Rambus was running memory at very high speeds in the late eighties and early nineties.
2) Synchronization was made possible through some of Rambus' patents.
3) DDR SDRAM is just now starting to reach speeds that RDRAM reached in 1997.

If Paul Demone's statements are not enough you might want to read the archives from sig-int mailing list and see how impressed experts in the industry have been with Rambus over the years.

Link please? I will check it out.

I must admit that with yellowstone they seem to be turning it around, quite a sensible design IMO. Though of course in some ways it is closer to SLDRAM than to RDRAM

So the same companies that were so close to providing amazingly fast SLDRAM can't use this same technology to make DDRII much faster than DDRI? I'm sorry, Marco. Some of the things you are saying are throwing warning signs up in my head.

We hoped we were partners with a company that would concentrate on technology innovation rather than seeking to collect a toll from other companies

Why does Craig Barret take this pot shot at Rambus? What company wouldn't protect their IP? I really don't understand the point he is trying to make through this quote?

[MfA]

Originally Posted by elimc

I believe people make mistakes. I just don't believe that they didn't consider in depth what RAM type to use. The idea is fairly ludicris.

They considered it in depth, and then made a mistake.

Who else would make this kind of decision at Intel?!

Like in any other company, management.

How fast do you think SLDRAM would be at today?

Probably not faster than Rambus, but I think it would have had less start up problems ... and without Rambus there would have been a more collaborative environment to speed along adoption of a sucessor standard.

1) Rambus was running memory at very high speeds in the late eighties and early nineties.

Let's make that early nineties.

2) Synchronization was made possible through some of Rambus' patents.

That and it was not meant for memory modules. We are talking the original RDRAM here, what we now call RDRAM was originally DRDRAM ... the followup standard.

3) DDR SDRAM is just now starting to reach speeds that RDRAM reached in 1997.

Quite impressive how far they can flog a dead horse, all considering.

Link please? I will check it out.

Signal integrity mailing list archives, try google :)

So the same companies that were so close to providing amazingly fast SLDRAM can't use this same technology to make DDRII much faster than DDRI?

Evolution versus revolution.

Why does Craig Barret take this pot shot at Rambus? What company wouldn't protect their IP? I really don't understand the point he is trying to make through this quote?

He apparently thinks differently on just how far their patents should extend.

Also I think he just doesnt like them very much on a personal level :) Intel became big because of technical excellence, not through protecting their IP (they tried, and failed mostly). Intel makes real products, its not hard to take pride in that and value it over just milking patents ... especially not if the company who owns the patents uses selective licensing to try to ensure they control the memory standardization process (which has the tactical advantage that it chills R&D from competitors).

[elimc]

Like in any other company, management.

And who do you think their management is made up of? Look at Craig Barret . . . what do you think his degree is in?

and without Rambus there would have been a more collaborative environment to speed along adoption of a sucessor standard.

I don't know about this. RDRAM was running at 800MHz before DDR SDRAM came out.

Those JEDEC guys are not all that collaborative, anyway. How much IP would one invest in an open standard? Not too much benefit from my point of view.

I'm still looking at the archives.

[MfA]

An engineer engineers, a manager manages. Management had to make decisions based on incomplete data shaped partly by internal politics and partly by the predictions of Rambus themselves (which did not turn out to be accurate). They also took into account what the success of Rambus could mean for them if they allied themselves with them ... so they had reason to make optimistic rather than pessimistic assumptions.

As long as it was still mostly paper even the best assesment Intel's engineers could make had to be partly based on guesswork ... and management relied on a wrong set of assumptions, neither them being engineers in the past nor being advised by engineers allows them to predict the future.

They made a mistake.

Money is made by companies making actual products, for them there is always an advantage in being first and for that they have to be actively involved in progressing the standards (in the case of memory).

Marco

PS. on reflection I should add to all this that while Intel backing SLDRAM instead of RDRAM might have made it succeed ... SLDRAM might have failed just as RDRAM, albeit a little less spectacularely (I dont think Intel would have had the same spectacular technical failures they experienced with RDRAM, which both delayed introduction and were horrid PR). Some of the biggest reasons why the industry did not like RDRAM apply to SLDRAM too, basically it just did not offer enough advantage to justify its added costs in die size and other costs related to breaking away from SDRAM.

[elimc]

Well I don't agree with you, but that's ok. I'm pretty sure Intel knew to almost the exact fps scored in Quake at different resolutions before the P4 even became silicon. As I understand it, it is actually the P4 design team themselves that have been pushing for RDRAM from the beginning. Many of their managers aslo have EE degrees, including the ones that would make the decisions.

He apparently thinks differently on just how far their patents should extend.

Also I think he just doesnt like them very much on a personal level Intel became big because of technical excellence, not through protecting their IP (they tried, and failed mostly). Intel makes real products, its not hard to take pride in that and value it over just milking patents ... especially not if the company who owns the patents uses selective licensing to try to ensure they control the memory standardization process (which has the tactical advantage that it chills R&D from competitors).

I'm not sure where you are comming from on this? The capitalistic system depends on IP. Intel is extremely fierce in protecting its' IP and makes quite a good amount of money on licensing alone. They would have done the same thing in Rambus's situation and probably would have won in the courts by now. How can you be angry at a company for protecting its' IP?

Even if Barret didn't like them, how come Intel signed a cross licensing agreement with them?

[MfA]

What does performance when they finally got the RDRAM to work to spec have to do with anything? That doesnt sell product ... RDRAM's cost and RDRAM's ability to operate in a complex system were the problem. Most of the reasons for the cost were not outside of the realm of engineering (and a little plain common sense on how markets operate) and all of its problems with operation which Intel ran into were down to engineering. Yet they failed to foresee both.

If cost did not matter someone could have easily designed a memory standard using an eDRAM process which would beat RDRAM in per pin bandwith for quite a while now ... we already have interfaces (but not memory specific) which are faster than RDRAM.

The capitalistic system depends on competition, on one hand patents will ensure companies competing to innovate where without patents the price of innovation might not be warranted by market benefits ... on the other it promotes companies to rest on their laurels and to try to use their patents to actually prevent competition (I assume I dont need to point out the myriad of ways in which that can happen, never forget that patents represent government granted monopolies). Wether it is a net win is anyone's guess, impossible to proove one way or the other.

I think everything we depend on in IT would have been discovered regardless of patents ... do you really think it would have taken 17 years for someone to commercialize synchronous signalling in memory standards without Rambus? (Let alone some of the more trivial stuff they claim intellectual ownership of.)

Intel makes money selling good products, the rest is just bonus ... their biggest competitor has access to pretty much all their IP, and that fact has done us as consumers a whole lot more good than bad Id say.

As for why they went into buessinuess with them, if others could have executed well when implementing their technology it would have been a good deal regardless of how "evil" they are :) You asked why he would say that, I said probably because he doesnt like them ... but as a manager he wouldnt let that influence his decisions if there was money to be made ... that was where it went wrong though.

[elimc]

What does performance when they finally got the RDRAM to work to spec have to do with anything? That doesnt sell product ... RDRAM's cost and RDRAM's ability to operate in a complex system were the problem. Most of the reasons for the cost were not outside of the realm of engineering (and a little plain common sense on how markets operate) and all of its problems with operation which Intel ran into were down to engineering. Yet they failed to foresee both.

For what they had to work with, I think they made a good choice. The i850, IMO, is one of the top chipsets ever made. Look at all the crap that DDR SDRAM went through. The mobos were nine months late and they still sucked. There is still inherent istability with DDR SDRAM chipsets. You think Intel wanted anything to do with it? What are the other alternatives? SDRAM? An EE told me at Sharkys that the definition of an engineer is, "Someone who can do for a penny what any fool can do for a pound." Something has to fill in the gap before the perfect system is created. How would you have gone about it, MfA? It's pretty easy to create the ideal product in your head. It's very hard to make that product successful in the real world.

If cost did not matter someone could have easily designed a memory standard using an eDRAM process which would beat RDRAM in per pin bandwith for quite a while now ... we already have interfaces (but not memory specific) which are faster than RDRAM.

So you want to compare RDRAM with DDR SDRAM which brings in no profit?

The capitalistic system depends on competition, on one hand patents will ensure companies competing to innovate where without patents the price of innovation might not be warranted by market benefits ... on the other it promotes companies to rest on their laurels and to try to use their patents to actually prevent competition (I assume I dont need to point out the myriad of ways in which that can happen, never forget that patents represent government granted monopolies). Wether it is a net win is anyone's guess, impossible to proove one way or the other.

You have a better system in mind, then?

I think everything we depend on in IT would have been discovered regardless of patents ... do you really think it would have taken 17 years for someone to commercialize synchronous signalling in memory standards without Rambus? (Let alone some of the more trivial stuff they claim intellectual ownership of.)

Who cares? Rambus did it first so they have licensing rights. If you don't agree with this system you can buy a house in Cuba. Look how successful their system is.

Intel makes money selling good products, the rest is just bonus ... their biggest competitor has access to pretty much all their IP, and that fact has done us as consumers a whole lot more good than bad Id say.

Intel fiercelydefends their IP. Sometimes it helps consumers, sometimes it doesn't. There are many large companies that make huge amounts of money from IP (IBM comes to mind). No, I don't think this is overly negative to consumers.

[MfA]

I cannot put myself in their mindset, we neither have their knowledge (even after all this time) nor have I their experience ... but given mr. Barret's comments I would tend to believe that a more cautious management should have decided on a two pronged approach.

As for how justified betting the farm on RDRAM was given its future "potential" ... well Im sure Intel and its shareholders did not view their lost sales due to lack of timely DDR chipsets quite as complacently as you. Disregarding that though in the end I think DRDRAM will dissapear without ever having made the investments back ... and you can hardly call it a step up to Yellowstone, hell that might not even end up becoming the winner against Intel's own ADT initiative (although I think thats flagging a bit) unless they can force the issue through licensing.

As long as money is being pumped around there is always people profiting, and DDR does it a lot faster than RDRAM.

I dont quite see why you equate patents with capitalism ... its quite trivial to see you can have a free market economy without patents, and Cuba is not that so it in no way prooves your point. Im not a communist, I believe in social democracy (I think its only just as long as you dont have a libertarian government anyway, and I think libertarianism while admirable in some ways just would not work ... although as far as patents are concerned Ill agree with libertarians :). I would like to see patent protection eroded, and if it turns out there are major areas of R&D which benefit society but which dont get funded that way ... they will just have to be collectivized ;) Or more likely just maintain patent protection in those fields. IT definetely wont be one of them though IMO (and not just because its benefits to society are so small either :).

Noone ever said monopolies cant make good money (talking about the patents themselves, not the individual companies who own them). That says very little about their net benefit to society, I shouldnt have used Intel as an example sorry ... should have stuck to "impossible to definetely proove one way or the other".

[Saem]

MfA,

could you elaborate on ADT?

Thread topic,

I believe Intel wished to use DRDRAM to basically take controll of the market to a greater degree. They had a lot of money in Rambus and would have made a huge amount of money. It didn't work so they're cleaning up the mess that's left behind. Mr. Barret's words are likely the PR damage control/clean up.

As for patents, I'm with you MfA.

[MfA]

Google a bit, on a technological level they do not have a lot to show and there seems to be a lot of friction with JEDEC ... it might end up disbanding and just reintegrating their efforts with JEDEC (all the ADT members are JEDEC members anyway). On a political level prophetic.

PPS. or on second thought it shows that considering it is all they are doing, still ...

[Saem]

Heh, I should have thought to google, my only concern was that an acronym like ADT would take me everywhere.

In anycase, I followed a link, which ended up being and EBN article covering the formation of the group.

As for you PS, MfA, the first EBN article you linked to hinted towards such a thing. I hope it goes through.

[mboeller]

The capitalistic system depends on IP.

Couldn't be farther from the truth. IP prevents competition. So the prices stay high. So consumers have to pay far higher prices and economy suffers. Most of the time even the IP-holder suffers, cause they sit on their IP milk it and don't improve/innovate. So when the tides turn they go under.

Most of the internet is open-source. Expecially the standards. All/Most the propretary interfaces/standards are gone. Without open-source their wouldn't be an internet. So their wouldn't be all this hype (which would have been good) but no internet-economy too (really bad, if you see how much money is made and how much people are employed ).

For private people IP is deathly even. Patents only "allow" you to protect "Your right" in court, but this is so expensive that you loose always, even when you win the battle.

[elimc]

lol . . . I should have known I was going up against people who believe in Socialist Democracies!

Anyway . . .

As for how justified betting the farm on RDRAM was given its future "potential" ... well Im sure Intel and its shareholders did not view their lost sales due to lack of timely DDR chipsets quite as complacently as you. Disregarding that though in the end I think DRDRAM will dissapear without ever having made the investments back ... and you can hardly call it a step up to Yellowstone, hell that might not even end up becoming the winner against Intel's own ADT initiative (although I think thats flagging a bit) unless they can force the issue through licensing.

I tend to desagree with you on this. I think that the average American consumer is not all that stupid and when he realizes the cost savings he will have by going with a 2.6GHz system on RDRAM that runs at the same effective speed as a 3GHz system with DDR SDRAM, RDRAM will win out. But that is JMO.

I also see a movement towards 10GHz at an incredible pace. In the future, all that will matter are BW and latencies. As the President of Samsung said, "Sure, DDR SDRAM is nice at the speeds we have now, but will we use it in the 3GHz range? I don't think so." (I can't remember the quote exactly, but it was pretty close to this statement). I don't see how DDR SDRAM will stay even close to RDRAM in the future. These 128-bit busses that are planned will cost quite a bit and will still not give the BW we need at 5GHz+.

This proves my other point in a way. The gigantic companies that contribute to JEDEC won't be able to be even close to the technology that Rambus is coming out with despite the fact that they are open source. If Infineon had just decided to pay Rambus royalties, they just might not be losing 900 million dollars a quater. Samsung paid Rambus royalties and are making huge profits on one of the few profitable mainstream memories.

It doesn't get more black and white than this: IP has allowed huge advances in technology compared to the backstabbing open source companies at JEDEC despite the lopsided investment into RandD at these huge companies. JEDEC is open source and look at the inherent stability problems that DDR SDRAM has compared to RDRAM. JEDEC created a shoddy product.

I dont quite see why you equate patents with capitalism

Capitalism with IP is much more effective. Without encouragement to invest into RandD, technology will simply stagnate.

I believe Intel wished to use DRDRAM to basically take controll of the market to a greater degree.

Here's my opinion: Intel chose RDRAM because it is superior to DDR SDRAM. Pretty simple opinion, eh?

Couldn't be farther from the truth. IP prevents competition. So the prices stay high. So consumers have to pay far higher prices and economy suffers.

If the consumers want to pay the price, they will. If they don't want to pay the price, they won't (basic economics). In America, the economy doesn't suffer with higher prices, it actually improves (if the consumer wants to pay for the product). I don't see where you are coming from on this one.

Most of the time even the IP-holder suffers, cause they sit on their IP milk it and don't improve/innovate. So when the tides turn they go under.

In the US, companies are allowed to add inovations to existing products and thus extend the amount of time companies are allowed to collect royalties on patents. Thus, there is large incentive to innovate (this is especially true in the medical industry).

Find me a country with a good IP system and a bad economy (I can't think of one off the top of my head).

[MfA]

What is your political colour BTW? Probably not a libertarian, because government granted monopolies are pretty hard to unite with that without some major mental blinders ... so fiscal conservatism? As long as you support big government we arent really that far apart you know :)

I can trade quotes for quotes, Intel's Pat Gelsinger on Rambus early this year :

great technology but more than likely to remain a niche technology due to legal and industrial dynamics

I hope by the time we are at 5 GHz that for really high bandwith requirements external memory will loose out to embedded. If/Where we do need high bandwith external memory I hope DRDRAM wont be the interface of choice, maybe Yellowstone ... maybe something else (probably something serial if Rambus's synchronous memory patents stick around till then).

Profit margins on commodity memory are non existant because of competition and over capacity, if RDRAM was the commodity memory standard those underlying causes would not go away.

RDRAM is not a huge advance in technology, if it was an order of magnitude better Id agree with you ... but what are we talking about in practice? 30% more bandwith, about 5% higher performance IRL and about 100% higher price. Rambus was commercialized before its time, it offered no real advantages up till only very recently.

If Rambus had wanted to make it a success they could have always gone with a RAND patent licensing policy, or put their money where their mouth was and got their own manufacturing capacity for that matter. Talking about return on investments, the memory manufacturing companies are the one's taking the real monetary risks ... why should most of the profit margins (because everything besides the IP licensing costs are just going to melt away due to competition) go to a company which invested the least? :) They have no obligation to do Rambus's work for them.

Countries which can effectively trade on the global market place are pressed into IP laws by WTO, so thats a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. Still plenty of countries not doing so hot at the moment, Argentina for one ... on the other side we have China as an example of a country with shoddy protection of IP and a good economy but you would just say that they profit using other people's R&D ... which goes to proove my point, the present situation is unique and no definite proof either way can be given using the situation itself since that just ends up in circular arguements. Its not like we have a second world to compare this one against where we can experiment with different settings.

For some thats a reaon to stick to the status quo, if it aint broke dont fix it. Being broke is such a relative concept though.

[mboeller]

Originally Posted by elimc

If the consumers want to pay the price, they will. If they don't want to pay the price, they won't (basic economics). In America, the economy doesn't suffer with higher prices, it actually improves (if the consumer wants to pay for the product). I don't see where you are coming from on this one.

So You don' know so much about marketing. Reduce the price to 50% then you will sell 5-10times as much (at least most of the time) look at Nvidia for example. They had to lower the price of the GR-Ti-Series (GF4Ti4200) and sell now far more high performance parts then before. This works nearly everywhere the same. So lower prices increase the demand, higher prices lower the demand. In the end lower prices means better business for the companies.

Find me a country with a good IP system and a bad economy (I can't think of one off the top of my head).

maybe the US when the software/standards-patents are in widespread use, because they only protect ideas and no products.