Saem said: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).
Rambus was running RAM at unheard of speeds in the early nineties. A lot of the stuff SLDRAM relied on was invented by Rambus.
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.
elimc said: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.
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
elimc said:I'm not going to be baited into discussing this.
Out of curiosity, what is your degree in, Marco?
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
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
We hoped we were partners with a company that would concentrate on technology innovation rather than seeking to collect a toll from other companies
elimc said: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?!
How fast do you think SLDRAM would be at today?
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.
Link please? I will check it out.
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?
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?
Like in any other company, management.
and without Rambus there would have been a more collaborative environment to speed along adoption of a sucessor standard.
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).
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.