Whatever happened to Rambus?

J

jbltecnicspro

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So my buddy just dropped off his old Dell at my house this morning so that I can salvage some parts for a LAN box, and I noticed that the RAM had heat spreaders. That's odd... And the slots were a little different looking too - and... what's up with those "blank" sticks in the motherboard? And then it hit me - it's one of those Dimension 8250's that had RDRAM back in the day! So - what the hell happened to RDRAM and Rambus? Why aren't they still around in PC's these days?
 
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jbltecnicspro said:
So my buddy just dropped off his old Dell at my house this morning so that I can salvage some parts for a LAN box, and I noticed that the RAM had heat spreaders. That's odd... And the slots were a little different looking too - and... what's up with those "blank" sticks in the motherboard? And then it hit me - it's one of those Dimension 8250's that had RDRAM back in the day! So - what the hell happened to RDRAM and Rambus? Why aren't they still around in PC's these days?
Click to expand...

Hi, jbltecnicspro,

Rambus is still around, but, as I understand it, they are living off of the memory patent revenues they control that the courts said DRAM manufacturers infringed on. RDRAM never caught on as the price was too high compared to the DRAM. Rambus wasn't "partner friendly" and wouldn't make deals for other companies to produce RDRAM as they, apparently, wanted to monopolize the memory market. This is my take on the Rambus history/drama and I'm sure others will wander by and tweak/add to the story.

Hope this helps.

Chucklr
 
DRAM managed to get good enough in performance at significantly lower price points. Intel backed Rambus from 99 until about 2001 until it saw that the other manufacturers were going to start gaining market share using AMD and DRAM. Intel backed off and Rambus really died as a product.
 
Chuklr said:
Rambus is still around, but, as I understand it, they are living off of the memory patent revenues they control that the courts said DRAM manufacturers infringed on. RDRAM never caught on as the price was too high compared to the DRAM. Rambus wasn't "partner friendly" and wouldn't make deals for other companies to produce RDRAM as they, apparently, wanted to monopolize the memory market. This is my take on the Rambus history/drama and I'm sure others will wander by and tweak/add to the story.
Click to expand...

Yes, this is all true. I won't buy a PC with Rambus products in it because of these reasons. Their products are used in some products though, like XDR in the PS3.
 
RAMBUS now makes its living off lawsuit awards and royalties. RAMBUS ram was overpriced and had very high latency. DDR surpassed it in performance and price and RAMBUS became irrelevant.

After this happened, they managed to piss off almost every member of JEDEC , an international standards committee. RAMBUS was one of the companies who contributed to the DDR memory standard in cooperation with other companies. These companies were suppose to have access to each other's contributions without royalties as it was supposed to be a cooperatively developed open standard. Well RAMBUS decided to change its business model to one based on suing everyone for using technology they contributed to the ddr memory standard after patenting their contributions after the fact. There were also accusations RAMBUS patented other companies open contributions and then sued them for infringement.
 
Lol, rdram got beat bad by ddr. rambus is a IP company these days.

I think my favorite overpriced rdram board was the Supermicro P3DRE
 
I remember RDRAM :) I had a stick go bad and spent about a month trying to replace it, then figured I just needed to upgrade
 
RDRAM was bullshit cuz it was stupid expensive and HAD to be bought in pairs etc.
 
heh...interesting...just the other day I bought 1GB kit of PC800-45 to put in a recently bought DELL

Precision 220 dual slot 1 motherboard for a retro rig.

I didn't know I also had to buy a damn VRM and a DELL power supply to get things running. At this point I remembered how much I disliked "non-standard" hardware 10-20 years back.

Just a pain in the ass.

/of cool story.
 
I also remember when Dell had split/raised motherboards, so if you wanted to buy something like a Video Card you had to go through them.
 
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