Rambus and Infineon have settled out of court

[DerKaiser]

If you say the future of computing lies in the hands of Micron and Hynix, or even Intel and AMD, it's definitely not me who's deluded.

What the f**k are you talking about? What planet are you on? Where did I say anything like that? You know, in general, when trying to convince people that you're right, it's probably a good idea to suppress the incoherent delusional paranoid thoughts that pop into your head.

 

[JackBurton]

Ice9, the reason these uninformed geeks get bent up all out of shape when Rambus is mentioned is because this flashs in their head:

Rambus=RDRAM=HighPrice=BAD

That's it! Now ANY information that they read that supports that statement lights up like a neon sign to them, and they'll stop the investigation right there and assume the "facts" they read are correct. No further investigation is necessary for them since they got what they wanted, which is Rambus=BAD. It's pretty much as simple as that.

 

[Ice9]

Originally posted by: DerKaiser

If you say the future of computing lies in the hands of Micron and Hynix, or even Intel and AMD, it's definitely not me who's deluded.

What the f**k are you talking about? What planet are you on? Where did I say anything like that? You know, in general, when trying to convince people that you're right, it's probably a good idea to suppress the incoherent delusional paranoid thoughts that pop into your head.

Pardon my fleeting thought. You just strike me as a dinosaur. I'm probably right.

 

[DerKaiser]

You just strike me as a dinosaur. I'm probably right.

You know, in general, when trying to convince people that you're right, it's probably a good idea to suppress the incoherent delusional paranoid thoughts that pop into your head.

 

[Tbirdkid]

nm, this is just funny along with the yahoo message boards....

 

[razor2025]

LOL.. this is like that South Park episode. Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich. VOTE OR DIE!

I really don't give a crap about these idiotic lawsuits. I hate the Mem manufactures because they're price fixing thugs. I hate RAMBUS because they are being asshat compnay that sues people for "profit". Either company is dispicable. But I would prefer Mem manufactures coming out ahead. If RAMBUS wins, then that'll give those thugs another excuse to jack up RAM prices. Also, from my own beliefs, any company that sues for profit instead of creating awesome products are bastards in my book.

Why are you defending RAMBUS so eagerly Ice9? Do you own RAMBUS stock or something? Please don't say "because of pricipal". That'll be the most idiotic reason.

 

[Ike0069]

Why the hell is this in the Hardware forum?

I couldn't care less about this topic, but it is funny how someone could defend RAMBUS with so much vigor. Watched The Recruit one to many times ice?

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: razor2025
LOL.. this is like that South Park episode. Giant Douche or Turd Sandwich. VOTE OR DIE!

I really don't give a crap about these idiotic lawsuits. I hate the Mem manufactures because they're price fixing thugs. I hate RAMBUS because they are being asshat compnay that sues people for "profit". Either company is dispicable. But I would prefer Mem manufactures coming out ahead. If RAMBUS wins, then that'll give those thugs another excuse to jack up RAM prices. Also, from my own beliefs, any company that sues for profit instead of creating awesome products are bastards in my book.

Why are you defending RAMBUS so eagerly Ice9? Do you own RAMBUS stock or something? Please don't say "because of pricipal". That'll be the most idiotic reason.

Him and i have both said we own rambus stock. Its foolish not to.

 

[dexvx]

What I think is really amusing is that if you even ATTEMPT to skim through the court outlines, internal memos from the major DRAM's, testimony given by the DRAM employees, they all basically say that they jacked Rambus's technology willingly and purposefully AND tried to strong-arm them out of the DRAM business.

And yet we still have people who refuse to read the first-hand sources and blindly follow what was said years ago by third/fourth/fifth hand sources on these forums and quote old antedotes like a broken record.

 

[Ice9]

Originally posted by: dexvx
What I think is really amusing is that if you even ATTEMPT to skim through the court outlines, internal memos from the major DRAM's, testimony given by the DRAM employees, they all basically say that they jacked Rambus's technology willingly and purposefully AND tried to strong-arm them out of the DRAM business.

And yet we still have people who refuse to read the first-hand sources and blindly follow what was said years ago by third/fourth/fifth hand sources on these forums and quote old antedotes like a broken record.

The average person who claims to be a "technophile" is usually anything but. The people on here who bash rambus are simply accepting the mass market pure and simple. They don't care about innovation. They're willing to accept incremental changes. They are simply not prepared for revolutionary ideas and breakneck speeds.

It's just too much for 'em.

I think if you asked the average PC-centric person in here, they'll say that "Cell" is just a waste of time and will never get off the ground. Just like what mainframers said in the early 80's as their jobs slowly disappeared.

I know what I want to see in the future. And it doesn't involve Micron, Infineon, Hynix or anything that has "JEDEC" support unless they are willing to embrace the better ideas that are out there.

The technology world has grown faster than any standards setting body could ever keep up with. It takes a lean and mean company like Rambus to innovate. You can either accept that they have the better idea and make it happen, or you can be like the scores of people here who are willing to accept that minimal incremental change.

Rambus RDRAM ran at blistering speeds for its time and had EVERYTHING going for it. But a single word was able to poison the well. "Latency". Everyone went on and on about how "latent" RDRAM was in theory - yet in practice it blew the doors off everything in its timeframe.

And like you pointed out, these companies outright ADMITTED that they were trying to kill off RDRAM and subsequently Rambus. But the well was so effectively poisoned by this smear campaign, people made up new reasons every day for why they should hate Rambus as a company.

Several outlandish claims were made about Rambus. They criticized their technology - then proved it was superior. They criticized their legal tactics, when they proved in court they did nothing wrong ethically or lawfully. They criticized their royalty rates - when in practice RDRAM royalty rates were the lowest of nearly all technologies in the memory industry. They criticized the cost of manufacturing - and even Samsung admitted it was cheaper to manufacture RDRAM than it was to manufacture SDRAM (not even DDR!). They branded Rambus as a company that sues for profit - when they never received a single award from any lawsuit (yet). They claim that Rambus "stole" from JEDEC, when in fact it was the companies that make up the JEDEC consortium who stole from Rambus.

Oh yes, this shoe has been on the other foot the entire time, but many people on this forum cannot be persuaded by the truth, even when it's there in plain text. They simply MUST hate Rambus. Yet many of these companies regularly root for an underdog in the industry named AMD. It's a double standard I will never understand.

People HAVE to hate Rambus as a company because these little trade rags told them to. They never saw the fire in the theater, but since several people yelled "Fire", they all flocked out of the Rambus theater as fast as they could assuming they were about to be burned.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Ice9
If Rambus had their way, your memory would be cheaper and ten times faster.

LOL.

That's the most patently untrue thing out of everything that you've said. Rambus wanted to make memory more expensive, accross-the-board, by being able to charge a royalty on every chip sold, paid to them. That would have added to costs, and raised prices across-the-board too, to compensate. For some completely illogical reason, you seemed to believe (in the prior thread), that having to pay per-chip royalty costs wouldn't change prices a bit, which is so completely wrong, you have no idea.

IBM wanted to charge a royalty on the MCA bus, and cards that used it. Result? The rest of the industry dumped the MCA spec.

Apple wanted to charge a per-port royalty on Firewire. Result? Intel dropped the firewire support being designed into their Socket7 chipsets at the time.

Why? Because those royalties would have significantly increased costs, so much so that they would have provided little benefit, and it was actually a financially better move for those companies to simply dump and not support the technology instead.

Guess what? The industry did the same thing to RDRAM. Why? Because it would have unnecessarily increased costs.

If you can't see that and at least admit to that one fact, then you are indeed a blind RDRAM fanboy/shareholder.

Originally posted by: Ice9
You are faulting the wrong party for the current state of memory.

Huh? DDR is standardized, plentiful, and cheap. I like it that way. Not expensive, and hampered by royalty payments that make the mfg of such less than cost-effective.

Originally posted by: Ice9
If you question Rambus' business plan, ethics or tactics, then surely you must think that subverting the JEDEC process for the purposes of THEFT must be pretty bad, huh? And that collusively lowering and raising prices to kill off a competitor must also be pretty bad, huh?

So now you've changed your tune about the memory mfg's "collusion", after I pointed out how blatently backwards your argument was in the last thread, and... now you are saying both "lowering and raising prices". Which is it? How can it be both? At least try to get your argument straight, before you make it, rather than blindly attempt to cover all the bases.

Originally posted by: Ice9
I suppose if you think Rambus' business practices and tactics are worse than the memory manufacturers

Yes, yes I do. Of course cartel-like collusion to keep prices high is also highly un-ethical, and I think that those executives that are serving prison time for their actions, are getting their just rewards for it too. Why Rambus execs are not likewise behind bars, is mostly a side-effect of the fact that their unethical practices weren't actually outright illegal. But no less deceitful and wrong, IMHO.

Originally posted by: Ice9
, you must work for Hynix or Micron. Either that, or your name is Bert McComas or Van Smith. Either way, all of those names are complete disgraces. Two have bowed out of the industry forefront. The others will too in time. As for you, you weren't swayed by the truth in other threads, I don't expect you to be swayed by the truth here. It simply doesn't seem to be in your nature.

It certainly wasn't "the truth", it was your "pro-Rambus agenda", which it couldn't be anything but, really, seeing as how you are a shareholder and are thus intrisically biased.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Ice9
By the way, the previous thread regarding all this is here. You can see plenty more twisted logic and falsehoods coming from VirtualLarry and others.

Excuse me, "falsehoods"? Please, point out where I have written a falsehood, and not simply a description of the events that you choose not to admit to.

Originally posted by: Ice9
Do your research. Don't blindly believe everything you read from trade rags, forum posts or the like. Read the damn court transcripts in full and base your decision on what both sides agree is the truth.

The court transcripts don't tell the whole story either - I read quite a bit about the ongoing saga as it was happening, in various industry magazines like EETimes and the like. Those are not "popular science" type mags, they are professional engineering publications, and generally very straight-shooting, including some editorials from actual engineers employed in the biz.

Originally posted by: Ice9
Rambus.org is a good starting point, as they have direct links to all the court dockets at the respective court websites. You're simply not informed of the truth otherwise, and you'll wind up looking like poor ole VirtualLarry; misinformed and hateful towards a tiny innovative company for all the wrong reasons.

Oh, of course, the *first* place that one should look, for an unbiased and factual account, is on the companies own website.

(The above should be directly indicative of Ice9's fanboy-logic here.)

Just like the best, most fair, and informative way to learn about things like the MS-DOJ or MS-Sun or MS-Novell lawsuits, would be on MS's own web site, on their press releases page, or BillG's blog page. :roll:

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
I own a pile of rambus stock as well.
It is inevitable that XDR will eventually be needed for multicore chips, DDR latency is getting too insane.

Not like RDRAM latency wasn't orders-of-magnitude worse than DDR or anything, right?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: DrMrLordX
Seems to me that everyone involved is either lacking in business ethics or is outright criminal.

Precisely. Ice9's argument was somehow that, because the other memory mfg's colluded to manipulate market prices, that they were therefore evil, and thus Rambus, Inc. were saints. I tried to strongly disagree with that, and I agree with DrMrLordX's evaluation of the situation.

But the real root cause of the problem, here, is two-fold: apparently JEDEC didn't have strong enough *formal*, written, regulations in place in terms of the conduct of their member companies/engineers, and secondly, the US patent system allowing the existance of "submarine" patents, which was what Rambus exploited in this case. Ice9 seems to fail to comprehend that I don't deny that what Rambus did was probably likely legal, within the framework of patent law, but that doesn't keep me from having the personal opinion that those actions were highly un-ethical, and "criminal" to me. My personal opinion is that if a company is aware of infringement of their patents, and yet willfully choses to do nothing about them, then they should lose the legal protection that their patents provide, over such infringement.

A little analogy: A homeowner, owns an "empty lot" next to their house. They know that they own it, but they don't tell anyone else, nor do they post signs. Some other people in the neighborhood, start to use the lot to park their cars on it. Again, the homeowner says nothing, although they are clearly aware that their legal landowner rights are being violated. They wait an entire year, until the rest of the neighborhood simply considers that "empty lot" to be a de-facto parking lot. At this point, the landowner thinks, "Profit!". He goes to the empty lot, now covered with cars, and posts a few signs quickly, claiming that the land is property of so-and-so, and that all cars parked in the lot are liable for a $100/day fee. (Very high.) The landowner also fences it off, except for a booth at the exit, and stations themselves there, waiting for the car owners to show up and attempt to drive their cars off of the empty lot, now turned into a parking lot. Some car owners show up, get pissed off, but they are in a hurry, so they just pay the "parking extortion fee", and leave. Some car owners, either can't afford the fee, or don't want to pay it, so the landowner calls and has their cars towed. etc.

So, in this case, what the landowner did, was arguably legal, but I would personally characterize it as highly, highly unethical.

Is it any wonder, that from then on, that person finds their home occasionally "egged" by unknown persons? Sure, someone like Ice9 might defend such practices, especially if he were sharing in the cut of the "parking fee", and again, the actions of the landowner were more-or-less arguably legal, but that doesn't inherently make it right.

Since this is actual physical land we are talking about, given a considerate judge, he might well declare that those that have been parking their cars there for some time, without the owner of the land saying anything at all about it, that they have been given legitimate inplied "easement" rights to continue doing so in the future. I can only hope that a "sane" IP court/judge, would decide similarly. But the tenents of patent law tend to make that not the case, sadly.

For another example of less-than-ethical "IP land grabs", look at MS's FAT32/VFAT specs. How they were seemingly able to patent them, after the fact, after they had been in common usage for years, blows my mind. (Since something in common use, could hardly be termed "innovative" anymore.) The wrong party in that case, IMHO, is the patent examiner that granted the patent.

In any case, it's clear that patent law is just plain F-'ed up.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Ice9
Read this, and please try to understand it as it outlines the very crux of this case. At the time Rambus attended JEDEC, they only had patent applications. The patents were not granted at the time. ALL those companies were under NDA from Rambus. This is all in the DOJ dockets. If you read them, you'll see that all these companies knew about Rambus technology long before SDRAM was an itch in JEDEC's pants. JEDEC only wanted to know about Patents, not patent applications.

Which is as much a failing in JEDEC's processes, I'll admit, as it was in Rambus's unethical exploitation of them for their own gains.

Originally posted by: Ice9
In fact, at the time it was illegal to state that you had patent applications.

Oh, and btw, please don't erronously accuse me of "falsehoods", when you continue to spread that untrue BS. There has never been anything *illegal* about disclosing either patents held, or applied for. In fact many products that I have purchased, have mentioned "patents pending or applied for", on them, as well as listing actual patent numbers from granted patents.

Please, if you really want to "stick to facts", stop blowing smoke yourself. The only reason for a company not disclosing something that was in a patent application, before being granted, was to reduce the risk of a competitor stealing their idea and getting their patent processed and granted before the original company. This risk was reduced when the changes were made in patent law, from "first to be granted", to "first to file". But it was never actually "against the law".

Originally posted by: Ice9
You could present your technology all you wanted, just don't say "we have patent applications on this." That's the law.

Oh really? Show me this law.

Originally posted by: Ice9
Rambus, once again, is not a memory manufacturer. They are a technology company that simply wants to be the brains behind an innovation, and leave the manufacturing to someone else.
...
Your post is the same weak argument that simply hasn't held up in court. In fact, it simply goes to show just how far these memory manufacturers are willing to go to squeeze a small player out of the market.

If your claims are true, that Rambus was a technology company, and not a memory mfg themselves, then how could these other mfgs, "squeeze a small player out of the market", when they're not even in the same market!.

Again, your logic skills leave a bit to be desired in presenting your arguments - Rambus would have to be a mfg, in order to be competing in the same market against other mfgs, and you stated that they weren't a mfg. So therefore that above statement cannot be true.

I personally think that it is far more likely, that they didn't want to encumbed their products with a hefty and non-zero royalty cost, which you somehow conveniently believe wouldn't have added to their costs at all, which cannot be true either. It may be minimal, but when you ship millions of chips/year, (and at times are forced sell them for less than it cost to make them, just to retain competitive market-share), then how can a company afford to pay royalties on top of that, and still remain competitive? I'm curious how you answer that, because I don't think that there is an answer for that, other than an admission that royalty payments do increase cost.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Ice9
The same thing will happen with technologies like Cell. Rambus is obviously innovating at a pace consistent with these new network-centric technologies. Rambus eventually abandoned simple DRAM design and expanded their horizons into chip-to-chip high-speed interfaces. They aren't sitting around applying band-aids to current technology to make it work a little faster. They're creating new technology that works several-fold faster.

Companies like Intel, AMD and SDRAM/DDR manufacturers are obviously working at a much slower pace - making incremental changes to their own existing designs. They are the new dinosaurs.

Rambus, more innovative than Intel and AMD? LOL!

At least they've found a more legitimate engineering gig, rather than attempting a get-rich-quick scheme by exploiting loopholes in patent law and JEDEC policies. If Rambus can transition into a legitimate engineering company, then fine, I'm all for that, but companies with too high of a lawyer-per-engineer ratio make me a bit nervous.

Originally posted by: Ice9
Forget about "32 bit versus 64 bit". Forget about "Intel vs. AMD". Forget about "DDR versus RDRAM". The future of computing simply isn't about that. It's about the network, and leveraging all of its resources to their fullest.

Don't be a dinosaur. That's suicide in the IT world.

"..This public service announcement, paid for by Rambus, Inc...."

Oh, and btw, it's called "Grid Computing", and IBM has been working on it for quite a few years. Including the software side, something that Rambus really hasn't touched, that I'm aware of, and is a necessary requirement for it to be able to do anything useful at all. Sun has also long been promoting the "network is the computer" idea, although they haven't been that sucessful in coherently marketizing it.

Btw, what does this have anything to do with Rambus and Infinion, other than to function as a pseudo-advertisement for Rambus? Afraid that without a little "help" in the advertising dept., your Rambus stock would soon be worth nothing?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Ice9
Everyone knew Judge Payne was the big obstacle. He kept screwing rambus at every turn. Everyone ELSE ruled in Rambus' favor.

Rambus no longer has to worry about Judge Payne. All that's left now is positive rulings. If you think THAT'S a bad thing, then it's certainly not me who's deluded.

So it's all about cherry-picking federal judges then, rather than on the merits of the case?

Originally posted by: Ice9
If you say the future of computing lies in the hands of Micron and Hynix, or even Intel and AMD, it's definitely not me who's deluded.

Are you trying to imply that "the future of computing lies with Rambus"? LOL. That's a good one. The unfortunate truth is, Microsoft controls all.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Ice9
They don't care about innovation. They're willing to accept incremental changes. They are simply not prepared for revolutionary ideas and breakneck speeds. It's just too much for 'em.

You're so full of it, I'm surprised that you aren't choking on the brown stuff by now.

How can you attempt to tar anyone that believes that Rambus isn't somehow the "second coming of technological innovation" as you seem to paint them as, with a huge brush that those people are somehow "anti-innovation". Excuse me, but some of us would prefer to patronize ethical tecnology companies. It's kind of like SCO claiming that Linux users/supporters, are "communists", and outright "thieves". Well, you just put yourself soundly in the same camp as SCO's PR people, congratulations. I hope you're happy with that.

Originally posted by: Ice9
I think if you asked the average PC-centric person in here, they'll say that "Cell" is just a waste of time and will never get off the ground. Just like what mainframers said in the early 80's as their jobs slowly disappeared.

For the record, I think Cell is a great idea, decentralizing and localizing processing needs, and allowing a connected network of nodes with processing capability, to act more or less like a coherent whole. In fact, I have some operating-system/storage-model designs that I've worked on privately in the past that would support such a model.

Originally posted by: Ice9
I know what I want to see in the future. And it doesn't involve Micron, Infineon, Hynix or anything that has "JEDEC" support unless they are willing to embrace the better ideas that are out there.

The technology world has grown faster than any standards setting body could ever keep up with. It takes a lean and mean company like Rambus to innovate. You can either accept that they have the better idea and make it happen, or you can be like the scores of people here who are willing to accept that minimal incremental change.

That's a major factor here that you seem to be ignoring - mfg costs. You yourself said that Rambus isn't a mfg - they likely don't tend to therefore see the costs of radical change vs. incremental change that a mfg would encounter. Most of the recent incremental "innovations" in the DRAM technology sector, have given us nearly the same level of performance increases as "radical" innovations would have, but at a lower cost to mfg. That's actually rather important, for a mass-market commodity part like DRAM.

I don't believe that JEDEC would outright reject any sort of radical design changes, as long as the mfg costs could be kept low enough. That's the primary key, because that organization serves those mfgs, and that's a bit consideration for them.

Originally posted by: Ice9
Rambus RDRAM ran at blistering speeds for its time and had EVERYTHING going for it. But a single word was able to poison the well. "Latency". Everyone went on and on about how "latent" RDRAM was in theory - yet in practice it blew the doors off everything in its timeframe.

No, "in practice", it had horrible real-world latency numbers, that actually got worse with larger DRAM arrays.

You're living in a dream world, if you truely think that it was somehow faster for real-world applications. As a matter of fact, Rambus was architected original, to cut costs, by using a low-pin count, but ultra-high-speed interface, in order to cut mfg (packaging/testing) costs. And so it did find some design wins, in console systems like the N64 and PS2. I don't have any problem with that. That's RDRAM's niche market. Not mainstream x86-based PC memory, because access patterns from running x86 code simply don't mesh well with RDRAM's technical attributes.

Not to mention the thermal issues - SDR/DDR tends to spread access patterns around nearly evenly across the chips on a DIMM, RDRAM did not, and thus required heat-spreaders. Nevermind the requirement for C-RIMMs, being inconvenient for upgraders, and more costly for mobo makers.

Originally posted by: Ice9
And like you pointed out, these companies outright ADMITTED that they were trying to kill off RDRAM and subsequently Rambus. But the well was so effectively poisoned by this smear campaign, people made up new reasons every day for why they should hate Rambus as a company.

How is poor technical performance in one area (while excelling in another), a "smear campaign"? (And I thought that you claimed that the other memory mfgs colluded to kill Rambus, through market manipulation of prices, now it's a "smear campaign"? Huh?)

Originally posted by: Ice9
They criticized their royalty rates - when in practice RDRAM royalty rates were the lowest of nearly all technologies in the memory industry.

But any additional royalty payments, are going to be of greater cost to the mfg than zero royalty payments.

Originally posted by: Ice9
They criticized the cost of manufacturing - and even Samsung admitted it was cheaper to manufacture RDRAM than it was to manufacture SDRAM (not even DDR!).

Were they speaking of individual chip costs, module costs, or overall system costs (including such things as C-RIMMs, etc.)? As far as *raw*, per-chip costs, excluding royalties, chips with less pins generally cost less in terms of testing/packaging. That's well-known in the industry. I'm guess that's what they were speaking of, and that you chose to take that quote out of context. I can't imagine it being the case any other way.

Originally posted by: Ice9
They branded Rambus as a company that sues for profit - when they never received a single award from any lawsuit (yet).

But if the reason that they sued, was to force the target company of the lawsuit, to capitulate and pay licensing fees, how does not recieving an award from the lawsuit itself, in an way invalidate the premise that the purpose of the lawsuit, was for Rambus to eventually profit from that action? It doesn't. Again, check your logic, please.

Originally posted by: Ice9
They claim that Rambus "stole" from JEDEC, when in fact it was the companies that make up the JEDEC consortium who stole from Rambus.

Are you basing that statement, solely upon the fact that Rambus, apparently, indeed was awarded the patent(s) in question covering the technology?

As far as Rambus "stealing", please refer to my prior empty-lot/car-lot analogy.

Originally posted by: Ice9
Oh yes, this shoe has been on the other foot the entire time, but many people on this forum cannot be persuaded by the truth, even when it's there in plain text. They simply MUST hate Rambus. Yet many of these companies regularly root for an underdog in the industry named AMD. It's a double standard I will never understand.

Uhm, because AMD doesn't pull unethical crap like Rambus (allegedly) did? AMD didn't patent something, already being designed into competitors products, and then go around and attempt to sue them for it? AFAIK, AMD even put HT under control of another organization, and they freely license it, just like PCI.

Originally posted by: Ice9
People HAVE to hate Rambus as a company because these little trade rags told them to.

Or perhaps we're not just all a bunch of blind fanboys, and shareholders, and that we don't believe that just because something is technically legal, that it automatically makes it right or not unethical.

Originally posted by: Ice9
They never saw the fire in the theater, but since several people yelled "Fire", they all flocked out of the Rambus theater as fast as they could assuming they were about to be burned.

Speaking as a consumer only, at this point - when Rambus-based systems came on the market, and Intel was pushing for a Rambus-only world, and yet, prices were higher, but performance was no better, and in some cases worse - that's when I decided that an RDRAM-based system wasn't in my future. It's much the same with Intel's early BTX/LGA775/915-925/DDR2 transition. No real performance increase, only an incompatibility and cost increase.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Oh, seems like Ice9 wasn't currently reading this thread; I'll wait for some of your replies then. See you tomorrow.

 

[imported_HansB]

Ice9, you know those pills the doctor persribed for you? yeah, you should take those before you get onto the internet.

 

[ribbon13]

Originally posted by: HansB
Ice9, you know those pills the doctor persribed for you? yeah, you should take those before you get onto the internet.

That was completely random. Are childish implications you're forté? How's this: 'Doess your mommy know you're neffing ATGH? You better behave otherwise she will shift+delete your pr0n collection'

 

[razor2025]

LOL, looks like VirtualLarry "Pwned" Ice9. I just don't get how these RAMBUS fanbois doesn't seem to get past their faulty logic.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Originally posted by: Acanthus
I own a pile of rambus stock as well.
It is inevitable that XDR will eventually be needed for multicore chips, DDR latency is getting too insane.

Not like RDRAM latency wasn't orders-of-magnitude worse than DDR or anything, right?

Unlike DDR, as clockspeed increases, LATENCY DECREASES, strange that PC1066s "horrible latency" took intel 2 years to beat in performance, and the roadmaps for rambus memory wouldve had a far superior memory to what I875 was up against had production and support continued.

 

[Ice9]

Ok, ok, ok... Before we ALL start insulting each others mothers, grandmothers, 3rd cousins once removed, and fossils dug up from long forgotten excavation sites, let's stick to the facts here.

We all know that Rambus had invented RDRAM in 1988 and filed for a patent in 1989. On the record.

We all know that Rambus had revealed their technology to Infineon, Micron and Hynix in 1990 via NDA. Also on the record.

We all know that Rambus was INVITED to JEDEC. On the record.

We all know that JEDEC is NOT opposed to licensing technology that fits the engineering need. Rambus clearly wanted to present at JEDEC, but to date has been the ONLY company that was barred from presenting their technology. Also on the record (FTC transcripts and the virginia trials).

Now VirtualLarry - if these companies knew about Rambus RDRAM via NDA prior to JEDEC even discussing SDRAM, how can these companies say "Oh, we didn't know Rambus had this technology"? Particularly when Infineon's own Willie Meyer circulated a memo stating that Rambus was a "deadly menace" to the computer industry, and that "someday all computer drams will need to be built like this, but hopefully without royalties going to Rambus"?

See, this is where your parking lot analogy falls flat. These companies knew about RDRAM under NDA. It's not under dispute like you seem to think it is. They have already ADMITTED that they infringe, and they have gone as far as to say they KNEW that Rambus held this technology. The only leg they have EVER stood on was that their patents should be declared unenforcable simply because they attended JEDEC meetings to begin with. One representative said at trial, "We didn't think their patents would be approved because of prior art". But no prior art was ever found prior to 1988. Rambus was simply the first.

Now i'm not saying someone else could have done it. We're talking engineering here. OF COURSE someone else could have developed this before Rambus. They simply....didn't.

Now, here's some points to digest, and PLEASE pay attention.

So basically,

Rambus had the idea first.

DRAM companies knew it, because Rambus wanted to work with them

Instead, they invited them to JEDEC in hopes of using JEDEC as a methodology to cherry-pick their technologies.

After doing so, they tried to use the fact that they attended JEDEC to have their patents rendered unenforceable.

These companies further colluded to keep RDRAM prices high and output low (also on record!) to keep the price unattractive - and make SDRAM more attractive.

The memory manufacturers effectively turned the tables on Intel, since Intel can't sell chips if there's no RAM available for them.

Rambus and Dell both cry foul.

The FTC sues, and rules in Rambus' favor.

Payne finds Rambus guilty of fraud and wins on appeal - and the top patent authority in the country says no reasonable jury could have found Rambus guilty.

The federal circuit hands the case back to Payne with a revised markman ruling defining a bus in the general term in which it should be.

Payne attempts to apply an obscure california "good faith" law against Rambus (in virginia, no less) and fails.

Payne, having nowhere else to go, THROWS OUT THE CASE, even after being given EXPLICIT instructions by the federal circuit on how to proceed.

This is all on the record, cold, hard, verifiable fact. I'm not saying Rambus didn't make any mistakes. Sure, they waltzed into Payne's court confident of a win. They were cocky and arrogant, and thought they could push this through. Obviously Payne, being the patent-law-ignorant judge that even he has claimed to be, didn't take too kindly to Rambus and decided he'd put the screws to them. He did this VERY effectively.

But the facts remain. Rambus had this technology first, everyone knew about it, and the JEDEC consortium cherry-picked it. They can't feign ignorance if they were under NDA.

Now i'm going to go out on a limb and apologize to VirtualLarry for any bashing, insulting, namecalling or insane ranting on my part. I'd LIKE for this discussion to be a factual one with a minimum amount of emotion. Yes, I have money tied up in Rambus stock. But it's because I believe in them as a small, innovative company. I've followed this case extremely closely, and from EVERYTHING i've read, no reasonable person could EVER favor the memory manufacturer's ethics over Rambus's.

Sure, Rambus played hardball. But the memory manufacturers broke the law. Which is more unethical?

 

[razor2025]

Sure, Rambus played hardball. But the memory manufacturers broke the law. Which is more unethical?

Huh? What kind logic is that? Please Ice9 check your logic before hittting the "submit" button. If it wasn't for the messed up IP / Patent system we have today, these stupid lawsuit wouldn't even have happened. Breaking the law doesn't neccesary equate with being unethical. Neither does using the law to your advantage can be considered ethical.

What RAMBUS is doing right now is completely unforgivable. Instead of striking out profitable liscencing deals (Next-Gen consoles), they would rather sink enomous amount of company resource into hitting the "sue-happy" lottery for loyalties from 5 years ago. Any company that base major or entire revenue off of lawsuits are POS in my book. Look up SCO.

Also, because I'm a consumer, I don't see how RAMBUS winning the case will benefit me. RAMBUS stock owners might get a hefty profit when RAMBUS wins, but it's crap deal for consumer. If RAM factories has to pay loyalties to RAMBUS, they'll be sure to jack up the price to compensate for that. But I guess, it's pointless to argue against someone who has vested interest in such a POS company.

And this whole RAMBUS - JEDEC relationship. It's stupid and naive. They knew that RAM factories were bunch of Mafia thugs, but they seemed to be naive enough to think that they might get to cut a liscencing deal if they showed their stuff at JEDEC. What kind of dumb@$$ company will allow bunch of other company to see their IP in a forum like meeting? Especially, when all the members are mafia-like entity? It's like RAMBUS wanted their IP to be stolen.

Also, RDRAM FAILED because it could not compete against SDR/DDR during the time it was unveiled. Add the fact that AMD was smart enough to keep their Athlon platform in SDR and DDR. These two things brought down the viability of RDRAM as a product. Intel intended to scale their P4 architecture into very high FSB/Clock. So, on paper, RDRAM looked like a good RAM technology to pair up with their new NetBurst (netcrap) architecture. However, due to Intel's overzealous marketing and craptacular CPU/Chipsets, their older generation (P3) and AMD's newest Athlons b*tch slapped early P4. If RDRAM was still around and supported by Intel today, they might be a good match against DDR due to the high FSB achieved by P4 currently. But.. that's not the case. RAMBUS was too arrogant to let RDRAM mature and wait till Intel had a solid platform to utilize their RAM. Nope, they had to be greedy and rode the Intel wagon. They thought that by using Intel's enormous marketing machine and its (practically) monopoly status, they could've been the RAM technology top-dog. Unfortunately, things didn't work out like they planned, so Intel dumped RDRAM like a used whore. And we aren't even talking about the cost of RDRAM ownership at the time. Even without considering the cost of RDRAM, their performance alone sucked major.

One major thing that stands out though. WHY did RAMBUS not sued the RAM factories in the very early 1990? If they knew that their had their IP stolen after the 1990 JEDEC, why haven't they filed suit immediately afterwards? Or even few years after? Instead, they waited till 8-10 years later, and brought out the lawsuits hoping to catch some loyalty lottery that they were "owed" since then.