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Patents

Documents Reveal Rambus' Patent-Enforcement Plans 88

Posted by timothy from the quick-memory-check dept.
spiro_killglance writes: "Electronic News Online asked the U.S. District Court of San Jose to release the Rambus Internal Memos on JEDEC. The court did so yesterday. Get the scoop here. But in brief, it looks like they were planning to stick it to memory manufactures all along, and did add patent claims from information gained at JEDEC in 1992." Hmmm. Rambus, slimy business practices? Say it ain't so.
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Documents Reveal Rambus? Patent-Enforcement Plans More

Documents Reveal Rambus? Patent-Enforcement Plans

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  • Dateline Pointlessville: (Score:4)

    by Minupla ( 62455 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [alpunim]> on Saturday February 17, 2001 @08:28AM (#424382) Homepage Journal
    In a suprise announcment today Rambus announced that they were retroactively announcing their patant for magenetic-core memory. Analysts speculate that this is a defensive move by Rambus in the event of a failure in their current bussiness model to patent other peoples' ideas that are currently applicable. This new initiative would patent other peoples' ideas that are already patented.

    When questioned weather he expected to be granted a patent, the CEO of Rambus pointed out Amazon's One-Click patent, and said, "What do you think?"

    When further questioned if he thought there was a market for slow memory in 128 byte chunks, he pointed out that people were buying RDRAM.

    --
    Remove the rocks to send email
  • No, you're wrong.

    Please go read Tomshardware stuff on RDRAM or
    Hardwarecentrals article.

    "However, when the memory system is under higher load the answer can be quite different. When one or more additional transactions are being serviced, factors such as bank conflicts and address bandwidth become important issues. The higher bank count of RIMMs versus DIMMs means that the probability of bank conflicts occurring is much lower. Therefore, the high latency and bandwidth penalties associated with bank conflicts occur far less often in RDRAM-based systems than in SDRAM-based systems. Furthermore, as illustrated in the previous timing diagrams, the need for 2-cycle addressing on an address bus used to specify both Row and Column addresses means that the address bus may not be available to start a subsequent transaction in SDRAM-based memory. During periods of higher memory utilization, when more than one request is sent to the memory controller, some memory requests may be delayed waiting for the address bus. For these reasons, under higher loads RDRAM-based memory can be much more efficient, achieving lower latency and higher bandwidth than SDRAM. "

    http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/r ev iews/1787/9/

    If you disagree, please provide some resources as foundation.

  • King Nothing:

    And it all crashes down, (the FTC and PTO, not to mention JEDEC, are going to grill Rambus for this.)
    And you break your crown, (the Rambus speed crown was broken by DDR SDRAM)
    And you point your finger but there's no one around!
    Just want one thing, just to play the king, (the king of RAM designers, that is)
    But your castle's crumbled and you're left with just a name (Rambus is a cool name, if only it wasn't so tarnished by this)
    Where's your crown, King Nothing? (After all of this, they'll have their assets kicked to Neptune)

  • Re:I think blame is being misdirected, here. (Score:5)

    by dachshund ( 300733 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @09:26AM (#424386)
    If RAMBUS implemented these technologies first, they're rightfully theirs.

    The primary issue here is not whether Rambus' patents are valid by themselves. The issue is that Rambus may have violated contractual obligations to JEDEC and its members. The JEDEC member rules specifically prohibit what Rambus allegedly did (sitting on patents while allowing them to become standards), and presumably if it's determined that Rambus violated those rules... then lots of penalties could be applied. I don't know what they might be (I don't know if they could actually invalidate the patent, or just force Rambus to pay huge settlements.)

    There's no point in JEDEC having a set of rules for just this purpose if they can't be enforced. It seems that if Rambus really did violate them, they should be punished. Otherwise, standards organizations simply can't function, as long as for-profit members can get away with breaking the rules and producing tainted standards.

    The other allegation, which is harder to prove, is that Rambus may actually have "stolen" ideas brought up duruing the JEDEC meetings. If that's the case, their claims on the patents may be illegitimate.

  • It is shocking that a corporation would invent something and then turn right around and patent it!

    It's only shocking because Rambus agreed not to file patents on any of the SDRAM technology, but while the standard was being made, Rambus amended an existing patent application to include new claims that covered SDRAM.


    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.

  • Welcome to the semiconductor industry, boys! (Score:3)

    by asackett ( 161377 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @11:36AM (#424388) Homepage
    This stuff has been going on in the semiconductor business for decades -- it ain't news, it's business as usual. Patent licensing and enforcement is very lucrative, and for many is the primary revenue stream.

    How d'ya s'pose TI managed to survive the latter half of the 1980's? Check out this guy's resume: http://www.jaeckle.com/attys/fitzgeraldthomas.asp [jaeckle.com] -- "As part of the Texas Instruments licensing program that generated over one billion dollars in patent royalties, he was responsible for identifying and enforcing TI patents against unlicensed U.S. companies. This activity included identifying infringers, reverse engineering and analysis of infringing devices, and presentations of that analysis to potential licensees to encourage them to take a license."

    I've been saying for the past three or four years that if we don't learn from the semiconductor industry, whose path we, the builders and users of the internet are following, we will end up with the same environment here, as well. Or, more succinctly, "Work toward your vision of tomorrow, or surely you will live in someone else's&quot.

    --

  • Re:RDRAM is used in Playstation 2 aswell. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    RDRAM takes a 20 to 30% hit in performance (latency and bandwidth) when you install a 2nd RIMM in each channel. The main reason for this is the RDRAM control protocol for addressing each RIMM.

    1. So on your super duper server with 4 channels of RDRAM, do you want a 20-30% drop in memory performance when you fully populate memory?

    2. A lot of server work depends on response time (how fast the server does something). Most server processing is reading/manipulating/saving data to/from memory/IO.
    With RDRAM latency being up to 50% more than SDRAM..
    a) a LIGHTLY LOADED server will be upto 50% slower.
    b) a HEAVILY LOADED server will ALSO be upto 50% slower. Why because faster processing of big chunks of data (more bandwidth) is OFFSET by more latency due to cache misses (heavily loaded server = more processes = more process switches)

  • A) The article linked to didn't make too good of choices in quotes...None of that info screamed 'MALICE' IMO.

    B) Enough talking...From what I've read in the comments to this /. story, it sounds like a cocktail party. Why are commercial entities the only ones pursuing this?
  • I wonder what will happen to things that use RAMBUS? Such as the PlayStation 2, and N64. Well, the N64 is on its way out but the PS2 has just begun, yet is already well established. They can't be expected to change the specs of their system at this point in time!
  • And your bases too!
  • Unfortunately, as Rambus is a corporation, the principals of Rambus are only liable for the amount they have invested in the company.

    This means that the principals are not liable as individuals for what Rambus the corporation does.
  • When I look at the P4 debacle, and the state of the P4 relative to the promises about it, I'm not sure that the P4 is going to remain a dead duck.

    What I see with the first release of the P4 is an incomplete processor pushed out the door by marketing 'droids. If the missing pieces of the P4 are ultimately implemented, it may actually turn out to be a decent processor with decent performance and expandability.

    My jury is out on that one for the next year. When/if the "real" P4 comes out, we'll see if it can actually keep up with the Athlon. If I need a kick-ass box before then, I expect that I'd buy an Athlon.

    As for RDRAM and a P4 with optimized code beating SDRAM (on what processor?), I think that you should be comparing a P4 with optimized code on RDRAM vs SDRAM (both using properly optimized chipsets), to know that it's not dependant on something other than the RAM protocol. Until then, though it seems that for the current state of the art, RDRAM doesn't seem like a very good bet.

    That having been said, the fact that they had to pretty much blackmail various manufacturers into use RDRAM doesn't bode well for the technical superiority of the technology either.
    --

  • The fact that a quote from the article which neatly sums up the entire RAMBUS story can get moderated redundant three times while drivel like this [slashdot.org] remains at +2 serves as a telling reminder that most moderators on Slashdot have no clue what they're moderating. While the quotes was redundant, it was no less pertinant to the story than 40% of the other comments on the story that were pure speculation, unfounded opinions and of the "my PC150 h4x0r MHz SDRAM is l33t!" type.

    In fact, if Slashdot posts were more informative in general, it wouldn't be bad thing. Remember when people who actually used to know something about the subject at hand would post intelligent responses? These days it seems like half the posts are people with nothing bright to say who instead resort to posting a +5, Funny attempt.
    --

  • You have no chance to survive. Make your time.
  • Well, I haven't really thought about the best way of interleaving data across banks with parallelization in mind. I think it's one of those things I'd have to see simulated before I could really picture it. You'd definately want more per bank in a higher-latency design, but the exact ratio isn't clear.

    I can definately agree with the idea of needing out of order transactions, that's one of the wins with SCSI. With many small requests you end up getting fairly large gains from serving some out of order where with large transfers the access cost is outweighed by raw transfer speed.

    As for the job stuff... I have to agree with the idea of people being cross trained. I myself rant about high-level programmers not having any low-level experience, they think that all instructions take as long to process, despite one translating easily into a single opcode and the other being a o(n^2) list operation on complex data. Argh. :)

    Anyways, I have to agree. People should know all parts of the system, even if they tend to specialize, because it enables them to better use the tools.

    And yeah, the short build cycle of software is a huge plus compared to an actual physical process. I remember making circuit boards (simple stuff in high school) and how screwing something up meant spending about an hour, with correcting the mistake, reprinting the board, etching it (and dying your hands green in the process) and then redrilling and soldering the components on.

    I'm so spoiled these days because I'm doing a lot of prototyping in stuff like perl. When I have to go to C I find myself saving the code and immediately trying to run the executable, forgetting completely about having to build it... heh. In some ways I can't imagine going back to a long build cycle.

    Regardless, hardware seems more tangible, mainly because it's hard to just hack together, so it's a larger achievement. I've only done little projects, but they still feel more impressive than the much more complex stuff I've written in code, most of the time.

    I guess a good mix of the two would be best. Some hardware design, but mainly writing the code to make the hardware do funky stuff. But then, being able to fix a hardware bug instead of having to just work around it.
  • All companies that aren't classified as non-profit ARE profit driven, everything they do is for profit. If they make an open standard, it is so they can make money in the long run. Making money is what companies do, it is not inherently evil.
  • Probably just dormant until they can reengineer the next big thing. It's not they don't have talent or technology, I think. They did sell their product to Sony for the PS2, Nintendo, for the N64, and Intel, for the P4.

    Come to think of it, all three are having problems. I wonder if it really is because of Rambus?

    Well, at least they have a good marketing department.

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • To answer you and the AC who responded:

    Many architectures support interleaving. If the CPU wants 32b at a time and the RAM is 16b wide, you simply use two banks. It's a bit more complex, but not by much.

    What modern chipsets do is decouple the CPU and the RAM. In old computers traces ran straight from one to the other. Today they use the chipset as a gateway. For the most part these chipsets are fairly stupid, the IDE drives of the RAM world. They simply take one request and pass it along, interleaving directly across banks.

    A server-level chipset is more like SCSI, it takes a list of requests and fills them in the quickest order. It also doesn't interleave just to get the number of bits / transfer that the CPU wants, it interleaves data across multiple banks which are each as wide as the regular data path.

    With a translator (the chipset) between the RAM and CPU, you're free to fetch the data in any way you want and then just assemble it for transfer to the CPU in the most convenient way. Complex chipsets are able to do this with more banks at once.

    That's a fairly gross oversimplification, but it's the jist of it.

    As to why it's not done... chip size and number of traces. DIMMs are 168 pins, you basically need that many traces between the chipset and the RAM, and for two banks, you need twice that many. In addition to the traces from the chipset to the CPU, and everything else it handles.

    Being that traces can only be so thin, you need more layers on the motherboard to cram them all in, which increases complexity and thus cost. Not to mention the chips being so big simply from the number of pins sticking out the bottom.

    This is where RDRAM comes in, it's got a narrow bus so it takes less pins per bank. But, RDRAM is much more complex than SDRAM, making it take longer to do something, like ask for the data at a certain address. That latency makes it slower start sending data even though with more channels it's faster once it starts.

    Compare this to SDRAM which is very fast to make requests of, meaning that it may be slower in the long haul but it's faster off the line.

    So it comes down to a price/performance tradeoff. Multiple channels of SDRAM is always better, but more expensive and harder to do. So for some things where a little latency is less important, RDRAM might make sense. Unfortunately this isn't (IMHO) in regular computers, but instead in texture cache on a PS2 or something.
  • We're calling the Ironica now!!!
  • or more Yet there have been plenty of innovations before then.
  • Well, the Tomshardware link isnt very positive towards RDRAM really, and Sander Sassens articles on hardwarecentral have been rather controversial.

    Theory is very nice, but unless there are some hard facts or at least consistent benchmarks made by several independent testers (rather than
    the dubious ones that exist now), that show anything more than an infinitesimal performance difference either way for general applications (and which currently appear to show a generally worse performance for RDRAM), the price isnt even close to worth it. Even for servers.

    http://www.inqst.com/ddrvrmbs.htm, tomshardware articles on ddr sdram, etc.
  • RDRAM is certainly the way to go, although the high price is not a factor when using RDRAM in servers. I think the desktop market will be still using cheap SDRAM for the next couple of years. RDRAM is nice for servers, but for normal pc-usage it's just too expensive. (Look at the videocard prices for the GeForce cards, mostly because of the expensive memory used....) I'll stick with SDRAM for awhile because it's very cheap.

    RDRAM is not the way to go, and not just because of price. DDR SDRAM is faster (benchmarks vary, but usually favor DDRSDRAM), cheaper (pricewatch $65 vs $129), more reliable (not because of RDRAM itself, but because of controller difficulties on motherboard), less power consuming, and cooler (RDRAM needs a fan). DDR SDRAM is also, by open source philosophy, ethically superior, because it is an open standard while RDRAM is closed. DDR SDRAM is superior to RDRAM in nearly every way.

    Presently, no video card exists which uses RDRAM, and given the thermal and latency issues with RDRAM, it's probably going to remain that way indefinitely. The high-end GeForce cards use high-grade DDR SDRAM at very high clock frequencies, which is much faster but generally even more expensive than RDRAM.

    ------------------
    A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.

  • I think blame is being misdirected, here. (Score:3)

    by screwballicus ( 313964 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @08:43AM (#424405)
    The really scary thing about this case has nothing to do with any conceivable illegality to these patent claims. What really worries me is that they have an absolutely legitimate claim, if what they say is true. I think we all agree that we need patent laws of some sort. If RAMBUS implemented these technologies first, they're rightfully theirs.

    The fact that these technologies could give them the patent to SDRAM isn't, in and of itself, at least relatively, worrisome. I think the idea that Microsoft owns the rights to Winblows has far more wide-ranging effects and is far more troubling than the possibility of a company owning rights to SDRAM.

    If you think that IT patents are crazy, look at some of the non-IT patents that have had half the world paying royalties, over the years. For years anyone using plexiglass (thousands of engineers and architects around the world) had to pay the fellow who patented it. The paper clip was patented in 1899. Everyone knows the telephone was patented. Motorola patented the cell phone, for that matter. If the idea of SDRAM's rights being owned is scary, it's because we should be scared of the idea of patenting, itself, not because of any misuse of patent law by RAMBUS. Trademark Infringement: Just do it.

  • No videocards indeed,
    but the Playstation 2 videochip
    set uses Direct RDRAM though.

  • To ensure open standards remain open, I think all profit-driven members of standards committies should be banned. It's the only way.

    I disagree with that viewpoint. Not all profit driven companies are scumbags. There is more than one ligitimate way to derive profit from a situation like this - pulling stunts like RAMBUS'es isn't nessisary. In fact, it's the really fscking lazy way to do it, or a last resort option.

    And even funnier - how do you propose to determine which companies involved are simply profit driven, and which ones have a very ligitimate desire to be involved in the creation of an open standard? Or do ypu contend that all for-profit organizations (individuals, companies, etc.) should simply be banned - and anyone with any real stake in the subject be left out of it?

    I could ramble on and on about this one - but I won't Yes, companies like RAMBUS piss me off, but, what are the realistic alternatives?

  • You must not read comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips [pc.hardware.chips] much. This issue has been hashed to death over there, and on most of the review sites, and in the vast majority of applications RDRAM has come up short in performance. About the only situation where it delivers clearly superior performance is in video encoding on the P4, and that's with encoding software optimized for that processor (good luck finding any). In nearly every other test, a 1.2-GHz Athlon with SDR SDRAM (not even DDR) kept pace with or outran a 1.5-GHz P4 with RDRAM. In a few benchmarks, even a 1-GHz P!!! with SDRAM beat the P4.

    The technology must be pretty pathetic for it to be bitchslapped so badly by equipment that costs maybe a third as much.

    (Either that, or you're John Corse, the RMBS Stock Shill, under a pseudonym. Then again, you're not coming across as shrill and strident as he does.)

  • Re:To stop this happening again. (Score:3)

    by Valdrax ( 32670 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @10:09AM (#424409)
    To ensure open standards remain open, I think all profit-driven members of standards committies should be banned. It's the only way.

    Then, no "profit-driven" member will adopt the technology. The whole point of standards is to avoid having the industry big-wigs develop redundant, incompatible technologies that lock in customers. With things like DRAM, no one who isn't "profit-driven" can really benefit from the work of a standards committee. Just try and manufacture a new RAM standard in your garage.

    Standards bodies are good, and it's essential to get the big companies on board to adopt the technologies created and to bring the experience in manufacturing and design that other entities just simply don't have.

    While I have a very low opinion of corporations in general, especially profit-driven public corporations, the majority of companies realize that acting against a standards organization is counter-productive. The only people who can afford to are all near-monopolies, such as Microsoft, or little underhanded IP clearinghouses with no actual product like Rambus.

    I'm just worried that companies like Rambus have spoiled the process for everyone else. Just like the article said, it's like a sporting event where you expect everyone to be playing fair. When someone doesn't, it casts doubt on all the other athletes and the event itself. The last thing we need is for Rambus's actions to destroy confidence in open standards organizations.

  • Re:wow this one was close... (Score:5)

    by Ian Schmidt ( 6899 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @10:13AM (#424410)
    That's because Microsoft applications don't use standard ASCII for quotes in order to do their "smart quotes" feature. There's a program called the "Demoronizer" that fixes that and other damage if you want your web pages viewable outside Windoze.
  • After this one, Intel will probably announce their DDR chipset very soon! Who wouldn't, after finding out that the Rambus RIMMs were all part of one huge orchestrated lie?

    They've already advanced the release date for Brookdale [ebnews.com], their DDR SDRAM chipset for the P4. It was originally due in 1Q 2002, but now it's been changed to this October. They don't want to see AMD continue grabbing their market share, and P4s won't sell as long as the Rambus millstone is around their necks. (Personally, even without Rambus, I doubt that the P4 is all that, given the benchmarks that have been released to date. I plan on replacing the K6-III in my main computer with an Athlon sometime in the near future.)

  • They may not be liable as individuals for what Rambus the corporation does, per se.

    But what about the charge of performing crimiinal/illegal activites, lying and fraud, using Rambus as the tool from which they profit?

    Framed differently, aren't they guilty of using and taking advantage of Rambus and it's employees and shareholders to perform acts of fraud and break of contract to their gain?

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • Like all good scams, this has already paid off for the principles. The Execs of Rambus have been getting their $N00K/year for almost the last decade. The lawyers get their piece too.

    When Rambus dies, they'll get handy severence cheques. After that, they'll sadly pack their porches and drive off into the sunset, looking for another sweet deal.
    --

  • Re:I think blame is being misdirected, here. (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17, 2001 @12:10PM (#424414)
    FTC v. Dell, 1996. While Dell was a member of VESA, it failed to disclose a patent relevant to the VESA Local Bus standard which it participated in developing. When Dell tried to enforce the patent some years later, the FTC stepped in, and Dell ended up signing a consent decree preventing enforcement of that patent. One month later, Rambus bowed out of JEDEC.
  • Apparently there is precendent for patents being declared invalid if there was fraud of exactly this sort, in previous situations. Other companies have failed to disclose patents pending during similar meetings of standards bodies, and have had the patents thrown out.

    I'm not taking the +1 bonus, because I can't find the links that I remember...oh well.

    thad

  • In that case, IMO, if/when RAMBUS loses, the other members of JEDEC should sue RAMBUS's principals.

    These memos seem to provide evidence RAMBUS execs were deliberately promoting fraud..

  • One thing you're missing out are isssues to do with memory sizes and pin limitiations (ie costs) at the low end .... bascily SDRAM works well when it's wide (64-bits or 128-bits) if you want to use the current state-of-the-art DRAM technologies that puts a low end to the size of your memory (and as a result a low end to the possible cost of the memory subsystem). Using so many pins also limits your package size (and potentially even die sized because the pad ring needs the equivalent of maybe 30-60 extra pads).

    This is the main reason that RDRAM first appeared in graphics subsystems (with maximum frame buffer sizes - rambus appeared at about the same time that VRAM sizes grew so that a 64-bit wide framebuffer needed more VRAM that the size of the framebuffer) - it also showed up in game systems about the same time for the same reasons.

    I also think there are real high-end places that RDRAM could be better (assuming the price comes down) - this is not so much due to the high bandwidth but due to the high potential concurrency (basicly the ability to sense many DRAM rows in parallel) - for today's CPUs with slow serializing buses between the CPU and the memory controller very little concurrency gets exposed to the memory subsystem - latency becomes everything - but on the other side of that bus is a superscalar CPU which is highly concurrent - potentially we could see 5-10 councurrent memory accesses (maybe more if you had speculative row senses) - applied to the memory if it were 'close by'.

    Anyway - my point - there are real places where rambus makes sense - where they are changes from time to time (the higher cost IS a big deal).

    (disclaimer - I'm a chip designer - I don't work for rambus, don't own any stock - but I've done 3 rambus based designs over the years for the above reasons [and 2 VRAM based ones and 1 SDRAM based one - you pick your design's sweet-spot whereever you can find it])

  • Do these industry groups JEDEC and all the other ones get patents on things that they standardize? I see the need for a patent holder non profit org that is around only to hold patents that can freely be used. No licensing crap, no legal this and that, just free patents. The only reason the patent company would be around is to hold the patents so that other greedy companies couldn't come about to do the rambus shuffle. Is there such a thing in place, and if not, why not?
  • exactly...as people they can still be liable. Suing them != suing the company. When someone sues a company, the people are liable to what they own because what they own is the company. But suing/charging the people has nothing to do with the company itself. They are liable as PEOPLE not as owners of the COMPANY. Incorporation creates a seperate entity. An executive usually owns stock(making its value part of the company) and is still a person able to be held personally liable for HIS actions. The tough part, well not-so-tough with these memos, is proving the individual had all knowledge of the crime committed.
  • I agree with you on that "use it where it makes sense". I just don't think that RDRAM makes sense as the main memory of a general purpose computer.

    For video, which is dealing with large concurrent data, it's fairly good. For databases which are small non-linear pieces of data, it's not.

    Your point about the concurrent memory busses is interesting, but I still think a general CPU would be best served by lower latency. And it'd be a different architecture, because you'd need to interleave the data across physical RAM a MB or so at a time instead of at the bit/byte level, or you'd need to hit all the busses anyways.

    I personally think you'd be better served by a decent L3 cache which could actually deal with this sort of issue better than a general-purpose memory architecture. Sort of the way an L1 cache can be so low-latency because of the tradeoffs being made in design.

    I can't say that I've tested this theory, but I think with the complexity of the controller you'd basically lose any speed benefits of the architecture.

    Sounds like you've got a great job. I often think I was born many years too late considering I love playing with the bare metal so much.
  • A real server, not something on a Abit-VP6, but something on a Tyan dual or quad CPU board, would be best served by dual or quad SDR-SDRAM channels.

    It's called the ServerWorks series of chipsets, read up here (on AnandTech [anandtech.com]): ServerWorks HEsl: DDR bandwidth without DDR SDRAM [anandtech.com]

    It'd add a few hundred dollars to the price, but it'd easily outpace anything RDRAM could throw at it, with all the bandwidth needed AND the low latency of a good technology.

    And they are expensive too...

    Macs did this a long time ago (memory interleaving) and it's nice to finally see this feature implemented in motherboards again. It'd be nicer if they'd be implemented in lower-end motherboards as well (if Apple did it years and years ago, it can't be some sort of trade secret...).

    Abit's "-RAID" boards should have it... they have RAID, why not use a "RAM RAID" as well?
  • 80% of their money comes from fucking patents,
    NOT ACTUAL PRODUCTS!

    They don't give a fsck if no one buys their ram, they can still mooch off others...

    Hope to seem them soon on FC, but it probably won't be so... remember that company that has a patent on http browsing? They are still around, slowly extorting money, "dubious IP and lawyers" can still get you a good living down in the USA
    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
  • "dust off, and nuke em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure"

    See? You're not really paranoid if they ARE really out to get you.

  • RAMBUS statement to the industry: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    all your base are belong to us
  • I bet all stinking capitalist corporations would do this if they had the chance, in fact I think Microsoft has a shitload of memos saying just this about their XML participations.

    To ensure open standards remain open, I think all profit-driven members of standards committies should be banned. It's the only way.
  • If the court wants to maintain any king of integrety then they will lock themselves in a room for six months and figure out how to preserve the integrety of patents where this case shows blatent misuse of patents which cuts accross the gain of what the US constitution had in mind. Not only do they have to withdraw the ammended claims, it is imperitive that they issue some type of penalty or there is bound to be copycats which will further bog down patent claims if they don't fear satctions. Plus if the court fails to completely and utterly slam Rambus, the majority of standards organizaions will disolve because the membership legal agreements will simply grow too exceedingly complex due to paranoia.

  • Links for some more info (Score:4)

    by villoks ( 27306 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @07:50AM (#424427) Homepage Journal
    The Register is running a short [theregister.co.uk]
    clip about the story. Also the PR department of Rambus has been active, the result can be seen [businesswire.com]
    here (althoug nothing very original, just typical quoted out of context defence)..

    It's anyway funny to see that Micro$oft isn't the only company which is conserned about the protection of "innovation"...


    My DeCSS archive:
  • My amiga2000 with a fusion forthy had memory interleaving too :)

    (oh and it was emulating mac 100%)

    Sorry I had to say it :)

  • wow this one was close... (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17, 2001 @07:51AM (#424429)
    Documents Reveal Rambus? Patent-Enforcement Plans

    Close guys. It is good you knew the "question mark" belonged somewhere in that phrase. And you were pretty close in putting it in the right position. Try one word over...closer....now try right after "Plans". There you go! I knew you could do it...
  • RDRAM is certainly the way to go, although the high price is not a factor when using RDRAM in servers. I think the desktop market will be still using cheap SDRAM for the next couple of years. RDRAM is nice for servers, but for normal pc-usage it's just too expensive. (Look at the videocard prices for the GeForce cards, mostly because of the expensive memory used....) I'll stick with SDRAM for awhile because it's very cheap. NB: Tom Hardware has a really neat article about Rambus: http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/00q1/000315/ index.html

  • what now? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But what does it mean?

    We all know Rambus has been using sneaky tatics to gain market share, i hope something really comes out of this. They've been holding back innovation in the memory field. How many millions of dollars have been spent in court rather than researching new memory technologies? Rambus doesn't care they have nothing new coming and depend that nothing new and improved comes out.

    Anyone seen the recent figures on their expenditures? 1/3rd of expenses is for lawyers!, i don't mind computer companies being run by marketers(MS) but its the ones run by lawyers that bother me. Think if there was a program like napster for computer memory, the creator would be on death row. Time for an anti-trust suit against rambus

  • They planned this all from the start. (Score:3)

    by AFCArchvile ( 221494 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @08:47AM (#424432)
    Take a look at this:

    From a Rambus business plan dated June 12, 1992: "Finally, we believe that Sync DRAMs infringe on some claims in our filed patents; and that there are additional claims we can file for our patents that cover features of Sync DRAMs. Then we will be in a position to request patent licensing (fees and royalties) from any manufacturer of Sync DRAMs. Our action plan is to determine the exact claims and file the additional claims by the end of Q3/92. Then to advise Sync DRAM manufacturers in Q4/92."

    This was all part of their plan! They applied for patents on RAM technology, and when they were approved, they lied in wait like a tiger ready to ambush its prey. And then, they saw their chance in 1992. To prevent suspicion of foul play, they waited 8 years to sue the RAM makers. And when they did, they claimed that they had patents established well in advance.

    IMHO, this was the perfect patent scam. They remained aloof while SDRAM proliferated in the consumer market, and then when computers all over the world were infringing on "their patents", they struck.

    I hope they all fry in a vat of their own excrement (or they can just have numerous stories on FC [fuckedcompany.com]). Such a despicable death is only fitting for this company of weasels.

  • "Documents Reveal Rambus? Patent-Enforcement Plans"

    Now if Slashcode could do something when moronic [fourmilab.ch] characters are present...

  • Going behind the backs of other companies standards meeting just so you could make more profit? I think all memory manufacturers should sue the great satan of memory for every penny they have made off RAMBUST to teach them a lesson about breaking rules such as these!

  • Re:RDRAM is used in Playstation 2 aswell. (Score:5)

    by WNight ( 23683 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @10:46AM (#424436) Homepage
    I know you're trolling, but other people have bitten, so I'll correct your lies.

    RDRAM tends to be the worst for servers. The large cache on servers negates much of the benefit of high bandwidth RAM. Instead it calls for very low latency. SDR-SDRAM is lower bandwidth, but also lower latency. RDRAM and DDR-SDRAM are higher bandwidth but also higher latency.

    Few real server applications involve sending fifty megabytes of static data per second, servers are called on to do dynamic data, sites like Slashdot, or CNN, or Google, where data is processed in complex ways and then presented. There's little locality of access (it's unlikely two things near each other in memory will both be wanted) so what really matters is how little time it takes for the server to fetch these isolated bits of information that it needs.

    A gaming station, on the other hand, frequently loads .5MB-4MB textures and sends them to a video card. This is only one primary read request and then a nice long stream. Both DDR-SDRAM and RDRAM shine in this area. Unfortunately, this benefit is negated by video cards with texture compression and 64MB (like all of the upcoming generation). The consumer-level chipsets used also negate many of the benefits of any technology.

    Low-end PC chipsets (the stuff most of us use) handle RAM a little inefficiently and most RDRAM/SDRAM comparisons are based on a consumer-level SDRAM chipset and a server-level RDRAM chipset, so they claim that the low-end chipsets deficiencies are problems with SDRAM where they're really just a problem with a consumer-level product. People are spending $400 for a GeForce 2 Pro, yet the chipsets for their motherboards cost $15 in bulk... It's like actually putting a porsche engine in a volkswagen, you might be able to make it fit but you'll realize that a porsche is much more than a fast engine.

    A real server, not something on a Abit-VP6, but something on a Tyan dual or quad CPU board, would be best served by dual or quad SDR-SDRAM channels. It'd add a few hundred dollars to the price, but it'd easily outpace anything RDRAM could throw at it, with all the bandwidth needed AND the low latency of a good technology.

    RDRAM only looks good on paper and a few carefully constructed (ie, outright lies) benchmarks. All the claims of Rambus are outright lies. And you can quote me on this. They're thieves, cheats, and liars. They produce no product and exist merely to patent technology invented by other people. If there's a list of people most deserving of prison, these guys and all their shareholders belong on it.

  • Smoking gun... (Score:4)

    by mikethegeek ( 257172 ) <.blair. .at. .NOwcmifm.comSPAM.> on Saturday February 17, 2001 @08:57AM (#424437) Homepage
    I think that these memos clearly show that RAMBUS all along intended to violate the legal agreements they had with the JEDEC members. And that they deliberately used JEDEC to get patents, and also to get their patented IP into the SDRAM standard...

    Now all it will take is an honest court and judge to hear this case. Which seems to be hard to get these days...

    However, time and money is against RAMBUS. RAMBUS is now left completely without friends in an industry that wants to see them gone. Micron, et all have time and revenue on their side... Even Intel is no longet their friend. Intel is speeding up the release of their own DDR chipset for the P4. RAMBUS memory has already failed in the marketplace, and royalties on that is about the only income RAMBUS has to feed their legal machine.

    So, one way or another, I think that this is the beginning of the endgame for RAMBUS. They are not developing any new technology (that we know of) to counter DDR. They put all their eggs in the basket of dubious IP and lawyers.

    And it will be good for the whole tech industry for RAMBUS to fall in a spectacular and final fashion. The RAMBUS business model (dishonestly patent shady IP then sue everyone) needs to be demonstrated to be a failure.

  • No, redundant is used to describe a post that makes the same point as most other posts in an article. I'm think of a word to describe mindlessly repetative posts that appear all over the place, and have almost no relevance to the article. For example:
    • Hot grits
    • Naked and petrified (this and the above have fallen out of style)
    • "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!"
    • Penis bird
    • "All your base are belong to us."
    • First post
    • The IBM-Nazi link

  • Is that even a word?
  • genre posting.

    thank you, drive through.

  • Given a choice between lesser performing RAMBUS memory and open standard, less expensive DDR-SDRAM, what memory do you think those companies will choose in the future?

    Even Intel has dumped RAMBUS for the future. RAMBUS read the handwriting on the wall over a year ago when Tom's Hardware and other sites discovered that common PC-133 SDRAM outperformed (then)7-8 times more expensive RDRAM. And DDR is faster than PC-133. At that point, RAMBUS started suing everybody...

  • Heck, both Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's Gamecube are going to use SDRAM over RDRAM. If that isn't bad news for Rambus I don't know what is.
  • I just don't think that RDRAM makes sense as the main memory of a general purpose computer. ...... For databases which are small non-linear pieces of data, it's not.

    The interesting thing to look at is the point where usefull concurrency maxes out - which is roughly the point where the data transfer time of cache line size matches the access time on a bank (this is different if you do speculative accesses) - if you assume that the memory accesses coming out the back end of the L2/L3 cache are random (not always true - but, apart from startup and context switch, simulation seems to bear this out) it's best to interleave across dram banks at a cache line granularity - this means that if you have enough concurrent banks (say 8) you can have concurrency 7/8 of the time (the difference between 16 banks 15/16 and 7/8 isn't much). However as I mentioned in my previous post if you have to send the data across a bus (slot 1 for example) that's much slower then either the memory (RDRAM clocks I mean) or CPU then you get little concurrency at the memory controller (which starts to win when it can choose between multiple concurrent transactions for the 'best one' - and it really needs 3 active transactions before this kicks in) - to make matters (here it hits latency) is when you have a bus (like slot 1, not slot A) where the memory controller must retire data back in-order - for a gross example an early transaction waiting for refresh (or any other bank conflist) will stall following transactions even though the memory subsystem might be able to retire them earlier.

    Sounds like you've got a great job. I often think I was born many years too late considering I love playing with the bare metal so much.

    Actually I started out as a programmer doing OS stuff (I ported Unix V6 for example :-) but I had always done some hardware stuff - I fell into chip design architecting Mac graphics accelerators - eventually it got easier to code Verilog myself than tell other people what to do .... these days chip design is very similar to normal programming - Verilog is just a wierd C - I actually think that chip design needs more designers with a software background - that hard wall between hardware groups and software groups has always seemed to me to be a real problem - there are lots of hardware software tradeoffs that don;t get done because neither group understands each other well enough.

    Having said this I've actually been trying to get out of doing full-time chip-design and in to doing a lot more software design - mosstly because I find coding is much more satisfying on a day-to-day level - doing chip design you're spending maybe 10% of your time doing the cool creative stuff that's really satisfying, and 90% of your time making sure that chip is absolutely perfect when you tape out - with programming you tend to get something working every day

  • Re:RDRAM is used in Playstation 2 aswell. (Score:3)

    by WNight ( 23683 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @11:20AM (#424444) Homepage
    Yup. RDRAM is best utilized in something like streaming video, or textures. Anything where you store a lot of large 512kB or larger chunks of data and want them to come in quickly.

    It does very poorly where you have data that's between 16 and 128B and you want many different little chunks from different places.

    RDRAM would shine in something like video encoding, or pumping textures to a video chip, or sending large static webpages. Stuff that benchmarks easily.

    RDRAM falls over doing things like Slashdot, where each page view might be constructed from five to five hundred database accesses and many little perl scripts.

    RDRAM is a quest for more bandwidth at any cost, whereas SDRAM is the quest for lower latency. DDR-SDRAM is a good middle-ground.

    RDRAM is fundamentally high-latency with its complex architecture. You can add more RDRAM channels and you can't combat that basic flaw. But if you take nice low-latency SDR-SDRAM and add more channels you get more bandwidth, thus counteracting any benefit RDRAM has.

    Now, slow RDRAM would actually be useful in low-end PCs, the sub-$500 market. You could make a very cheap motherboard because it requires less traces. You also wouldn't care about it being really slow because, hell, it's a $500 PC running a Winchip or something. But, Rambus killed that idea with their license fees, they'll end up making it so expensive that nobody could use it except in a server, where it really really sucks.
  • Prominently displayed on the main page of rambus.com is this: "The chip-connection specialists. We never stop innovating."

    I believe that this change would more accurately reflect the true nature of Rambus: "The tech-lawsuit specialists. We never stop litigating."

  • Hell, after this fiasco, it might be bumped up to July or August! Then, the P4 might become a viable choice.
  • I don't know how you call that but to me, what RAMBUS did is plain and dull patent fraud. When you take somebody else ideas and secretly amend your pending applications to cover those ideas, you actually wrongly pretend anteriority and knowingly lie to the US PTO.

    Now that's specific to the US or, more exactly, it was until the reform of patent laws last year to comply with international standards. Up to last year, the US had a very special status for anteriority where it was when the idea was first formulated which mattered, and not when it was first filled with the patent office. Hence, the importance of escrowed lab logs where engineers had to write down and time-stamp every idea that flied through their mind.

    As far as I know, those RAMBUS patents were granted before the reform and thus covered by the old status.

    My $0.02
  • Here is the simpilest solution. Pettion ALL motherboard manufactureres to NOT support the RAMBUS memory. If RAMBUS want to be bunch of dicks - then let them get a dick in the ass. If no one will support their memory the'll be out of business. Just have the other memory manufactureres get together and develop another standard and exclude RAMBUS from the picture. Send the bitches(RAMBUS) into bankruptcy court next.
    Done end of story!
    Just my .02 worth.
  • Even if the patents aren't proven to be illegitimate, a sufficient punishment for Rambus would be merely to make things right: to grant a perpetually paid-up license to JEDEC members to use Rambus's disputed patents for free. And this would have the bonus punitive effect of turning their US$46-stock into a penny stock.
  • I like that.

    Thank you. May you find a nice cookie in your kitchen.

  • Slashdot readers can lissen to Matallica all day long if they like...
    They can use Windows if they choise...
    They could liccens one click shopping if it sutes them...

    Slashdotters don't move in lock step...
  • I suspect any company trying to develope an open standard with multiple companies invovled may need to really work hard and beef up the membership contracts to prevent things like this from happening again. If everything developed at a joint meeting is automatically owned by the standard committee, it might help alliviate some of the problems.
  • Since RAMBUS will becoming to UC Berkeley for an infosession, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on how to protest, or what questions to ask them?
  • "RDRAM is certainly the way to go"

    Maybe for playstation and N64, but RDRAM based PC's are routinely slower than their DDR counterparts.

    I wonder if PS2 were being designed today if they would still use RDRAM? Probably not. It was fashionable when it was designed, but now its an evolutionary dead-end.

    When you add in their higher price and lower performance, RDRAM's time has come and gone.

  • Disclosure (or lack) the real problem (Score:4)

    by LauraLolly ( 229637 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @08:16AM (#424455)
    They do show that Rambus was well aware of JEDEC rules requiring patent disclosure, and of the JEDEC discussions. This is highly relevant to Hyundai's claims here and in Germany that Rambus violated JEDEC rules to obtain the broad patent coverage by secretly amending its patent applications to cover ideas and technology discussed at JEDEC without disclosing this to the JEDEC members

    It is not under question here whether Rambus really could file for those patents. What is under question is whether these undisclosed patents violated existing contracts. If it can be proved that Rambus acted in bad faith on the contracts, all kinds of contract fun comes into place. IANAL, but this looks as those who are will make lots of money off of this. The lawyers may be the only ones who make good on this in the end...

  • The Patent trool (Score:5)

    by Felinoid ( 16872 ) on Saturday February 17, 2001 @08:20AM (#424456) Homepage Journal
    More and more patents seem to seem like the intelectuall version of "First Post"s...

    Rambus joins a group develuping new technology "First Patent"...
    Amazon and one click shopping "If we didn't they would have"...

    The whole busness of "We patented it before you could do it" is getting silly...
    It's just a good thing for Microsoft somebody didn't patent FUD or they'd be sued up to there eyeballs...
  • Im not sure exactly which kind of server RDRAM would be good for tho. Most servers Ive ever seen would be even more sensitive to latency issues compared to a desktop, due to the multiuser nature of servers in general.

    Maybe it would be useable for some very specialized multimedia work or computation machines, where the benefits of high bandwidth would outweigh the latency problems.

    But if you have to go that far out from any ordinary usage to find a use for the product, just forget it. Its probably not ever worth it. RDRAM might find a niche if it was cheaper than ordinary SDRAM but as it is now, its dead.
  • "However, when the memory system is under higher load the answer can be quite different. When one or more additional transactions are being serviced, factors such as bank conflicts and address bandwidth become important issues. The higher bank count of RIMMs versus DIMMs means that the probability of bank conflicts occurring is much lower. Therefore, the high latency and bandwidth penalties associated with bank conflicts occur far less often in RDRAM-based systems than in SDRAM-based systems. Furthermore, as illustrated in the previous timing diagrams, the need for 2-cycle addressing on an address bus used to specify both Row and Column addresses means that the address bus may not be available to start a subsequent transaction in SDRAM-based memory. During periods of higher memory utilization, when more than one request is sent to the memory controller, some memory requests may be delayed waiting for the address bus. For these reasons, under higher loads RDRAM-based memory can be much more efficient, achieving lower latency and higher bandwidth than SDRAM. " --Tom's Hardware, quoted by sn0wdude

    Remember, that paragraph is a theoretical evaluation, based on the benchmarks and on the author's personal opinions. Looking at the benchmarks, I noticed that the SDRAM used was CAS3 (low-grade), which will perform more poorly that CAS2. It compared this against PC800 ECC RDRAM, which is top-grade and extremely rare. A search on Pricewatch came up with $41 for 128MB CAS2 PC133 SDRAM, $154 for the same amount of PC800 RDRAM.

    This significantly hurts the credibility of the benchmarks. In the one benchmark where RDRAM took a significant advantage, the author says that "the benchmark isn't designed to make efficient use of memory architecture, and the scores don't fairly represent it, this is still a good measure of raw memory throughput", seemingly contradicting is own results while affirming them. On the Q3A benchmarks PC133 SDRAM out-performed the PC800 RDRAM, and on SYSmark RDRAM won only by 6%.
    ------------------
    A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
  • Email from Richard Crisp, then a senior executive at Rambus, dated Wednesday, May 24, 1995. (Crisp describes some of the technology presented by the SyncLink consortium at a JEDEC meeting):

    "...As far as intellectual property issues go here are a few ideas: 1) DRAM on a packet oriented bus 2) DRAM with low swing signaling 3) DRAM with a two wire initialization system 4) DRAM with programmable access latency 5) DRAM with on-chip address space decoding..."

    So the Rambus RIMMs were only a red herring to deceive the FTC and the PTO into believing that Rambus was actually making a new technology. It didn't even have to work well; it just had to function. And Intel fell for it.

    After this one, Intel will probably announce their DDR chipset very soon! Who wouldn't, after finding out that the Rambus RIMMs were all part of one huge orchestrated lie?

  • all your base are belong to us.

    Not my base, FreeBase. It belong not to your. All my base are belong to Open Source Base.
  • What question mark?

    Netscape + Linux will show a question mark in place of '. I don't know why it does that, but it bugs the shit out of me everytime I'm using NS+Linux (which is not often, thankfully).

    --

  • No videocards indeed, but the Playstation 2 videochip set uses Direct RDRAM though.
    Sony's web page was painful to navigate and lacking on specs, but a Google search came up with this [gamespot.com] and this [ign.com], both of which confirm that the video subsystem of the PS2 use DRAM, while the main memory is RDRAM.
    ------------------
    A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
  • Apparently whoever wrote this article had never heard of the quote mark: "

    Hint: it's right there next to the return key. It's real hard to tell what is a quote and what is being written by the author without them. Apostrophes are missing, too. Looking at the HTML source shows that they really are missing, rather than using some wierd Windows-only characters. Someone must have been using some gooey HTML tool that stripped 'em. Youd think theyd notice theyre missing.

    As for this revelation in the case, all I can say is send in the attack lawyers!

  • Rambus PR critter says:

    We look forward to an expeditious recognition of Rambus' innovations in court.

    I think this goes to show that in the future Big Brother will not have us using NewSpeak, but MicroSpeak instead.

    Me thinks Rambus is a double-plus-innovative company.

  • I don't see what your problem is, it's a perfectly cromulant word.
  • ... was already grabbed by virtually everyone doing adertising out there (probably covering the grits down pants part too), and i really hope never to see the intellectual version of the goatse thing.
  • ... if Intel can't pull some legal tricks on Rambus for deliberately sabotaging RDRAM by annoying virtually every RAM Manufacturer out there with their royalty practices and hence hurt sales of Intel chipsets tied to RDRAM.
  • I wonder if PS2 were being designed today if they would still use RDRAM? Probably not. It was fashionable when it was designed, but now its an evolutionary dead-end. Well, Nintendo has already dropped RDRAM from the designs for their next gen game box.
  • Hardware central SDRAM vs RDRAM [hardwarecentral.com]
    [SDRAM vs RDRAM, Facts and Fantasy @harwarecentral.com]
    "We think it is about time to step away from the endless price/performance discussion and open our eyes to the potential Rambus Direct RDRAM has to offer. We're not saying you shouldn't keep an eye on good value, but due to all the negative press Rambus and Intel have gotten for adapting this new memory architecture, the focus hasn't been on the performance potential of Rambus, but on the price and supposedly poorer performance of Rambus modules.
    Given the technological advantages Rambus Direct RDRAM offers over current and upcoming memory technologies and its scalability we're confident that once prices start dropping and the technology becomes more commonplace we'll value its performance, bandwidth, robustness, and above all its scalability. " (See link)
    So: No you're wrong, RDRAM's time will come! :-)

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