This article is more than 1 year old

Smart money still on Rambus Ink

Buy now, rake it in later

The share price of memory company Rambus hovered just below the $70 mark yesterday after precipitous falls in its value since June. But analysts, both financial and technological, believe that the Rambus platform is still likely to dominate the market and could do so within a year. Although attention has been focused on Rambus because of Intel's failure to ship product supporting it, Richard Gordon, senior memory analyst at Dataquest Europe, thinks that it will eventually pull through. He said that technologies such as DDR, a souped up version of PC100/PC133 memories, were likely to disappear. "DDR is really just an interim measure on the way to Rambus," he said. "It's not as scaleable." The interim technologies were likely to appear and disappear. His view is that over the next three quarters the market is likely to see Rambus memory technology start to appear in some volumes. "Sooner or later, Rambus will win out," he said. And he expects it to become the mainstream technology by the end of next year. However, at the moment it's pretty hard to get hold of RIMMs. John Byrne, co-managing director of Vanguard in the UK, said that the demand does not yet exist because of the lack of platforms. And Sukh Rayat, managing director of electronics component distributor Flashpoint, agreed that at present there was little demand. That could change when Intel gets its act together on the i820 chipset. Gordon said that the technology itself does not have any inherent problems and memory manufacturers will cut the prices on Rambus memory when demand begins to climb. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like