Rambus yields fall to 10 per cent, disties claim

Rambus yields have slumped from 25 per cent to less than 10 per cent, according to dealer and distributors attending this week's Computer Trade Show. Andrew Mackenzie, head of memory broking at Rambus licensee Memory Corporations, said: "Rambus is dead. The yields are low because Intel is trying to force through the technology." He compared the idea of buying Rambus RIMMs to buying a car from a Ford dealership, which then wanted to charge an additional $6,000 for selling the steering wheel to make the system work. Other distributors at the Computer Trade Show in Birmingham also estimated Rambus yields were well below the 50 per cent that was claimed by Kingston Technology last month. A major distributor for a $500m t/o Japanese corporation said motherboard manufacturers, including Tyan, have dumped the RIMM solution in favour of synchronous DRAM. "Tyan dropped it [Direct Rambus] because of pricing issues. RIMM memory is still between three or four times the price of synchronous memory." ®