Don't fall for hyped-up press releases. Rambus has been around for almost
10 years, and still has no presence in the PC market. intel has invested in
the company, and is mandating usage of the device, but manufacturers are
resisting. intel is now attempting to sneak the devices into PCs with an
SDRAM slot adapter scheme, but the memory will be expensive and will
suffer from latency delays inherent in the technology. At the same time,
other manufacturers (including Samsung) are moving ahead full-speed
on 133 Mhz DDR SDRAM technology, which runs at the same speed as
RDRAM and does not suffer from the latency issues, in addition to being
backward-compatible with existing devices with no price premium. Check
the EETimes web site for a recent article describing how IBM and others
are already ramping up volume production on the parts. Since VIA and
other vendors have already built in support for the DDR SDRAM, millions
of current PC owners could potentially benefit from this natural evolution
of RAM technology. As was mentioned in other responses, your math
is obviously off by at least an order or magnitude. Finally, it will
astound
many observers if these devices manage to reach even a 15% market
share by year 2000 (especially in terms of unit volume.)
And since
>Interesting news of RAMBUS DRAM development:
>Samsung announced 288Mb module RAMBUS inline ( single module )
>of 1.6Gbytes/s transfer rate.
>This is 25 times of EDO DRAM
>and 10 times faster than PC100 SDRAM.
>Intel is expected to adopt this new DRAM
>for the 440BX chipset.
>Shipment of this chip expected to start
>early 1999 and would make up 50% of DRAM market
>by end of century.
>--
>regards
>Leong