http://www.businessweek.com/techno [...] 714385.htm

It appears that Micron (along with everyone else) really was attempting to price fix the memory market against Rambus. This may not be news to some, but there's email evidence now.

I take back all the horrible things I've ever said about Rambus. :-)

Obviously it's irrelivent now as RAMBUS is obsolete. Even with the apparent "Micron/Hynix Axis of Evil" they were still not being particularly helpful with their actuall product being incompatible with other techs etc...

Well of course it isn't/wasn't compatible. Hynix and Micron stole all of Rambus's ideas and used their market leverage to make them mainstream.

DDR was invented by Rambus. Rambus just failed to patent a few key featuers of RDRAM that ended up (stolen) in DDR. Rambus's primary mistake was being too naiive.

I still don't like Rambus. Their memory was horribly expensive and not really much faster than DDR in the real world. Sure the memory benchmark numbers were impressive, but thats about it.

They're just bitching because they lost the war and want to whine about it.

If they didn't like the fact that memory makers weren't fond of their memory because the huge fees they'd have to pay then they should have lowered said fees until a reasonable level was attained. Even with DDR theres hardly any profit so with Rambus the prices would be even higher to try to make a tiny profit.

Court case or no court case, you can't really blame others for your naivity.

DDR was a pretty major advancement, though...you shouldn't really be able to get away with such major theivery of tech.

lol, ya... you shouldn't get away with that kind of theft... *cough* how about windows? stolen from apple that stole it from xerox... and there are many others less "high-profile"...

...ya, this industry is not built on that kind of thievery, that is why intel and amd have such open doors for their dev teams. That is why apple does not mind when a site posts leaks about new tech.

@ FITCamaro: Much of the reason RDRAM [/i]was so expensive is b/c of the price fixing mentioned in those emails. Yes, they had license fees, but the price would not have been so out of whack if ddr had not been fixed so low. Flat out, when the p4 first came out ddr was not even close to where rdram was for performance. It was not even dual channel at the start while rdram was...

I still believe in a the market we have and the fact that rdram was leveraged out of it is part of the game. It just sucks that the better tech lost.

Such is life though... Sony knows that game well enough. Betamax, minidisk... even sacd and potentially blue-ray are/were all the "better" tech but the market went another way based on price wars. Perhaps the ps3 will put in rdram at the last minute to make it a true lead zepplin?

PS2 had RDRAM and that did okay for itself!

MD was never superior tech, though.

im just confused. at first, the conspiracy was to keep the prices high, and now it's to kee the prices low. they gotta pick one!

ask any sound recorder and they will tell you MD was far superior to CD. You can record much more accuratly with a finer level of detail. While playback was initially comparable (at both of their inceptions in 1980/81) CD has progressed while MD has not b/c of lack of industry support. MD was also vastly more re-recordable and robust than CD. It is even older by a year I believe.

MD simply had the same sony proprietary license crap that doomed beta and the rest of the industry was still hot after the bad taste from beta. Outcome was predictable, but I still have a MD player/recorder and it is by far more durable than my ipod or even any portable cd player I have had, and even sounds better in many cases. (personal preferance there of course)

JMO, take it for what it is

what the hell are you talking about?

you are in the wrong thread pal.

rofl - I was trying to work out what all that crap meant

I have mixed feelings about the whole Rambus thing. It seemed toooo expensive when it was out and I know at the time Rambus didnt want other companies making compatible Ram so they jacked up the fee's. Then the other companies came out with DDR witch was more of an open design... I have to say every time a company has tried a closed hardware that was expensive the industry has responded with something realy good PCI replaced Microchannel just for this reason. I agree its sad to see Rambus in the state its in, at one time they seemed to be the future and now it just seems they will be a footnote...

RAMBUS is NOT obsolete. Their XDR chipset is going to be in MILLIONS of PS3s. They get royalties from nearly everyone. They mostly get used in embedded systems, with more bandwidth than DDR8 .

That was screwed but RAMBUS started it by holding back patent applications from JEDEC way back when.

They did file the patents, they just didn't tell JEDEC until after DDR came out. That's why they didn't win every lawsuit.

This is what happened:

Hynix, Samsung, etc all made RDRAM. The purposely fixed RDRAM prices very high so that no one would buy it. None of the memory manufacturers liked the idea of paying royalties. So then they drove the price of DDR down so that it was more attractive to everyone... that in turn helped DDR catch on faster than RDRAM.

Rambus only charged a 5% royalty to memory manufacturers (even less for hynix i believe). That's nothing and it sure as hell didn't account for the more than 50% premium Samsung et al charged for RDRAM. As it turns out that 50% premium was really designed to put Rambus out of business. And that it did (at least in the PC market anyways).

Now does it makes sense?

Rambus isn't nearly as evil as Micron, Hynix or Samsung. And remember that Rambus does not make memory- they design it. They're an IP company. The only way they make money is off licensing and royalties.

back the truck up man, I was not directing anything to you at all... my response was to MesaRectifier. I had made a joke earlier and he had a more serious response that I felt needed a response in return. I had my opinion about the subject for him. Nothing more.

Next time before you crap on someone look at the "in reply to: " portion of the post and try a simple task: it's called reading and comprehension. If the post is not directed at you, read the thread it is directed at. Then it might bring clarification. Otherwise you could pose a simple question like "excuse me sir, but could you explain what you are meaning?..." That task is simply called good manners.

Trolling around and mucking with other's conversation is just plain rude you freakin' n00b.

RAMBUS the technology is obsolete, you can't argue with that. RAMBUS the company is still going, having had the world leader in 'crying to mummy' technology for the last few years.

(Sojrner, MD vs CD is an interesting one. For instant, on-the-spot recordings in high quality, practicality of rearrangement of tracks and 'rugged-ness' it really was/is great. I just don't really like the frequency chop required to get the data onto a smaller disk )

Right

So it's saying RAM prices especially top DDR2 modules (now dominated by Micron chip) could have been cheaper. Is the point???

Cuz honestly I don't give a fu[b][/b]ck if a company steals stuff from another, as long as they provide me cheap stuff I'm happy.

fair enough man. reality is that regardless of what it had that was better; it lost... and (to come back full circle to the point of this thread) so did rdram.

rambus got restitution for their "pain and suffering" but rdram will never come back in the pc world. Something else maybe, but the that depends on what we have going on at the time in the industry i think... and whether or not the price of licensing is worth it.