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Rambus yields only at 50 per cent

Where, oh where are those lovely RIMMs?

What a nice chap John Tu, one of the co-founders of Kingston Technology is. He wasn't at our breakfast meeting with the company this morning, but a prepared statement on the Rambus fiasco was. In the statement, Tu says the following: "The new technology today is Rambus and the yield is only in the 50 per cent range. If current production lines are converted from today's technology to Rambus, and the yields on Rambus are not up to expectations, this is an overall reduction of current production. Overall volume is compromised during this transition period." Very interesting. And so how is the availability for Rambus RIMMs getting on? According to two executives at Kingston, realistically we cannot expect to see too many RIMMs on the market until the beginning of next year. Kingston also confirmed a story we wrote some days back confirming that unless you use the same type of RIMM in an 820 mobo, you may run into the sort of timing problems that made everyone decide to just use two RIMM sockets. And it now seems that suddenly everyone has got very realistic about what percentage of the entire memory market Rambus will get. According to Kingston, their estimate is 20 per cent by the end of next year, and the execs also quoted recent Dataquest estimates that next year the amount will be 16 to 20 per cent. Intel is very coy. It estimates that Rambus will have 50 per cent of the memory market "in 2001". This could, as one hack at the breakfast pointed out, be January the 1st 2001 or the 31st of December 2001. And did you know that Rambus has dropped the word Direct as in DRDRAM? We didn't. But it has. Of course, Intel will not use Rambus for its Merced-Itanium platform, as we revealed from the Developer Forum. Incidentally, Kingston also gave us a press release which said that it now supported the Intel OR840. That means that this mobo,which was launched on the 25th of October, is only now any use to man, woman or beast. That's nearly two months.... ®

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