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United States Intel Patents

FTC Dismisses Complaint Against Rambus 175

Posted by timothy from the endurance-contest dept.
swordboy writes "A federal judge just threw out the FTC lawsuit against Rambus. This has been discussed at length here before but this changes the landscape yet again. An interesting, possibly coincidental item is that Intel just today announced a new and very powerful DRAM interface that bypasses Rambus IP altogether."
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FTC Dismisses Complaint Against Rambus More

FTC Dismisses Complaint Against Rambus

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  • Woo (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:04PM (#8312015)
    Now, the question is, does this offer the same price-point as DDR?

    I mean, DDR-II has a significant price-premium over current DDR, but if it doesn't....

    Woo. It might be worth going Intel for once :)

    • I mean, DDR-II has a significant price-premium over current DDR

      DDR 2nd Mix [ddrei.com]? That's still way old.

      • Yeah, but you see, its so old now it has scarcity. The current DDR will set you back..what, maybe 40 quid, but if you needed DDR 2nd mix to complete you collection....that baby's gonna set you back a bit.

        Still, kudos for posting the joke. I was thinking it, but didn't want to say anything ;)
    • DDR-II? Shouldn't they call it QDR?
      • No, there was some talk of sending 4 times per clock cycle, but it wasn't done. DDR2 is also double pumped, it's reworked a bit so it can faster at the top end. In fact there is some overlap in thier speeds, kinda like how intell or amd somtimes tweek a processor to go to a higher clock rate without much else improved.

        Mycroft
    • "I mean, DDR-II has a significant price-premium over current DDR, but if it doesn't...."

      God knows why... I thought half the point of DDR2 was lower cost per die, making it cheaper than regular DDR, since you halve the clock speed to get the same memory bandwidth (although there are some additional latencies which usually means DDR2 needs to be clocked at about 60% of DDR to acheive the same bandwidth).

      Brief description here: http://hardware.earthweb.com/chips/article.php/32 9 5571

  • Time is of the essence (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:05PM (#8312023)
    Intel just today announced a new and very powerful DRAM interface that bypasses Rambus IP altogether.

    Unfortunately, most court disputes between hi-tech companies finish long after the technologies in question are dead. Just look at Lineo/Canopy : when they won the DRDOS settlement against Microsoft, Windows 95 and DOS were already just a painful reminder of the past.

    So yes, perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Intel can do without the Rambus IP. However, I doubt it's the real reason, because even when the disputed technologies are obsolete when the court reaches its verdict (or the parties settle), the money from damages or settlement is very real.
  • Within 5 years, I predict that most machines will use RAM memory for all system storage. A backup power system will be required, but system speeds will go through the roof due to faster data access times.

    Hard drives fail and are slow as hell. They are the bottlenecks in 99% of today's systems. That will change soon, thanks in part to Intel and AMD.
    • Within 5 years, I predict that most machines will use RAM memory for all system storage

      Tally-ho then, time to get Duracell stocks I guess.

    • Re:This is an important decision (Score:5, Insightful)

      by El ( 94934 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:16PM (#8312098)
      Hard drives fail and are slow as hell. And are several orders of magnitude less expensive per byte stored. Unless something happens to drastically alter the relative price of hard disks vs. RAM, I predict that you're blowing smoke.
    • sooooooo

      when the power goes out and you have no where to store your static data like the OS, you will have to reload it?

      and daily backups will be a mandatory issue for even casual home users?

      yeah, your a crack head.

      hard drives fail a lot less than the power goes out, by a factor of millions I would day.
      • No, no, he might actually be onto something. Use a large, fast ram-disk for main storage function, with a large, slow harddrive to do dynamic backups, with a UPS system to give the system enough time after a power outage to finish synchronizing the contents of the ram-disk with the backup drive(or drive array or whatever) . . . that might just work.

        Clear the main ram-disk at power-down, read in all the data from the backup drive/array at power-up, and only use the backup when relevant changes to the conte
        • Huh? What would be the point of doing this? You would just end up having to have as much RAM as you normally have HD storage, yet RAM is still FAR more expensive than HD Storage.

          I just did some quick calculations based on the cost of the components in my new system. My system RAM turns out to cost about $0.16 per MB, while my HD storage, the drive AND the controller together, costs about $0.014 per MB. This is at least a 10x difference in cost, and I'm comparing normal middle-of-the-road RAM to one of
    • RAM will never replace disk storage - my prediction. How are you suppose to upgrade the system with power on? Just let the sparks fly? :)

      What about if you want to move your data to another box? Even if you think if Flash or whatever, these are slow and die much faster than a HD.

      I have no idea how the parent is "Insightful". Moderation hint for parent: Funny + 5

      • Re:This is an important decision (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Sivar ( 316343 ) <charlesnburns[ AT ]gmail DOT com> on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @11:30PM (#8312579)
        1) Memory hotplugging exists today. It's hardly an insurmountable problem.

        2) Even if it were (and didn't already exist) MRAM (Magnetic RAM) is non-volatile.

        Still, I have to admit that hard drives have been "scheduled" to be replaced or obsoleted 3 or 4 times now, and every time, they have survived. They are just cheap and versatile and "fast enough", and for applications that want a high sustained transfer rate (STR), they are really quite fast. Fujitsu's latest [storagereview.com] SCSI drive can handle nearly 80MB/sec sustained for more than half of its capacity. Yo would need a hell of an expensive FLASH controller to outpace that, and FLASH technology is still hampered by a "limited number" of write operations before it dies.
      • A system based entirely around SSDs would rock. But the problem is the backup for the SSD is a hard drive of the same size, so the cost will always be higher, or at least until the RAM is $0. :-)
    • Within 5 years, I predict that most machines will use RAM memory for all system storage. A backup power system will be required, but system speeds will go through the roof due to faster data access times.
      Yeah, but addressibility comes into play. Today's most powerful consumer computers can only address 8GB of memory(Apple G5's, whether or not they are the most "powerful" isn't the point, but they are one of the few consumer level 64 bit machines out there), in order for this to come to fruition, assuming

    • Re:This is an important decision (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ImpTech ( 549794 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:58PM (#8312375)
      Oh come on! Thats just silly. Lets take all our data and put it in *volatile* storage! You said it yourself, "a backup power system will be required". What are you gonna do, put solar panels on everybody's monitor? Battery backups for all? What happens when the battery needs to be replaced? For all the failures of harddrives, you've never seen a dataloss apocalypse like what you're proposing.

      Oh, and as far as bottlenecks go, when my internet pipe can bog down my harddrive, then I'll be concerned.
      • Oh, and as far as bottlenecks go, when my internet pipe can bog down my harddrive, then I'll be concerned.

        Dunno if it's occurred to you, but you can "read" data off a hard drive too, not just "download" to it. And better still, it doesn't have to involve your slow old net connection!

        I've noticed that, when "reading" from my hard drive (for such things as loading my warez appz, copying/moving my pr0n, searching the IE cache to read my sister's hotmail etc), I still have to wait for it to finish sometime

    • Re:This is an important decision (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:58PM (#8312376)
      Depends on what you mean by "RAM". FRAM and MRAM are rewriteable, random access memory technologies that are also non-volatile. Densities and price points today don't make replacing your current RAM cost effective, but give 'em a chance.

      Hard drives will still be around for bulk storage. Dollars-per-bit counts, too.

    • Within 5 years, I predict that most machines will use RAM memory for all system storage. A backup power system will be required, but system speeds will go through the roof due to faster data access times.

      Not a chance in hell. The only acceptable solid-state data storage medium is non-volatile memory i.e. "flash" memory. No one anywhere will risk all their data to any storage medium that a dead battery would wipe out. Flash storage is waaaay too slow for primary storage. Even a modern IDE hard disk
    • > Within 5 years, I predict that most machines will use RAM memory for all system storage. A backup power system will be required, but system speeds will go through the roof due to faster data access times.

      Take it a step further. Why should you waste your electricity and ram on just "storing"? Store it on your isps shell account which contains a 5gig ram drive for you. Of course the shell is free with your 20 dollar a month fiber drop ;)

      Take it another step. Why would the isp want to store multiple cop

  • Quality... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Eric_Cartman_South_P ( 594330 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:06PM (#8312029)
    My R0mbu0 RAM works f1aw1ess01. I wi10 the go01vernment would lay 0ff Ramb0us. THey m1ight have been a bit pa01tent mad ear101ly on, but it was not because they failed to make a good product. The00101110ir RAM works very, v10ery fast and I love it100110. I on0ly use Ram1001bus RAM in my b0010x.

    • My R0mbu0 RAM works f1aw1ess01

      Not much of a joke to me. One of the servers at work recently trashed its boot disk. Running Memtest86 shows memory errors throughout its 4GB of RAMBUS memory.

      • I had one of the early HP Kayak computers with Rambus memory. HP ended up having to send out an entire *daughter board* to remedy the Rambus issues.

    • Re:Quality... (Score:4, Funny)

      by chunkwhite86 ( 593696 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @11:28PM (#8312568)
      My R0mbu0 RAM works f1aw1ess01. I wi10 the go01vernment would lay 0ff Ramb0us. THey m1ight have been a bit pa01tent mad ear101ly on, but it was not because they failed to make a good product. The00101110ir RAM works very, v10ery fast and I love it100110. I on0ly use Ram1001bus RAM in my b0010x.

      Yeah, right. Whatever you say pal. Everyone knows that overclocked CAS2 DDR400 is the most stable kind of me

      [NO CARRIER]

  • Cheap (Score:3, Funny)

    by ThisNukes4u ( 752508 ) <tcoppi@@@gmail...com> on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:07PM (#8312036) Homepage
    Does this mean that RDRAM will become affordable now?

    • Re:Cheap (Score:5, Interesting)

      by filtersweep ( 415712 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:21PM (#8312131) Homepage Journal
      I fried a mobo on my Rambus system a few weeks ago and quickly found out how rare these mobos still are- and how little the price of memory has dropped over the last two years.

      Memory is like disk space. The general population demands quantity over speed or quality. Rambus was a technology that never really trickled down to the average desktop.

      • are you implying RAMBUS was high quality? (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @02:07AM (#8313385)
        It wasn't. It had a high latency and it's bandwidth only exceeded the bandwidth of SDRAM a bit at first. Then, as DDR ramped up to speed, DDR blew it away in bandwidth and latency.

        Rambus was never a great idea. It was very difficult to design a mobo with it. It is rumored that no company ever designed one without the help of Rambus the company.

        To be honest, the only reason Rambus went anywhere is because Intel signed an agreement to force bundle it with P4. And this act itself launched Athlon and AMD, because Rambus was unaffordable and didn't provide levels of performance that were unreachable with regular RAM.

        If Intel had applied the same level of effort to their SDRAM or DDR motherboards, they would have produced higher performance than Rambus at lower cost. But Intel didn't, they had signed an agreement not to. And they threatened to sue VIA if they brought a (presumably high performance) SDRAM chipset to market for the P4. Only once Intel shipped their own SDRAM-based P4 chipset (the 8200?) did Intel drop this threat against VIA.

        RDRAM was mostly marketing. It's performance was never really all it was cracked up to be.
      • A relative of mine got suckered into replacing his Athlon DDR-based system with a P4 RDRAM-based system. The box has 128Mb of RAM, they need more, and aren't overly rich. I'm sure they're kicking themselves even now.

  • Rambus is a proof of what SCO can do (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:10PM (#8312057)
    Rambus story shows that, in US, anything is possible in courts, even if you screw people, even if you do nasty things, outrageously lie, etc... at the end you may get awarded in court.

    That's why making fun of SCO doesn't make me laugh much, because there is a possibility that they can get what they want in the courts.

    • In the end however, this particular case is most likely going to be a non-event. DDR RAM is the common RAM of the moment, and Intel just announced a newer, claimed to be much faster, memory model that completely bypasses all Rambus patents. So, Rambus may be awarded its patent... to effectively nothing.

      As for the SCO case, I don't think so. SCO is claiming sets of 2-4 lines of code in more than 700 lines of code in Linux are "infringing" copyright! Are those infringing bits of code if-else clauses with "

  • RAMBUS is so dead (Score:5, Informative)

    by lingqi ( 577227 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:19PM (#8312114) Journal
    Actually it's more like RAMBUS has *been* dead ever since DDR / DDR2 became competitive in terms of prices.

    Not just regurgitating history, though - I wonder if Intel will learn a lesson from RAMBUS's demise in regard to the new fangled transmission scheme*. RAMBUS died because it was 1) not open and 2) charged royalties. DRAM is such a low margin product that royalties will kill any possibility of your product hitting mass market (in RAMBUS's case, even with intel's backing - because none of memory manufactures liked it, so despite playing along they were really thinking of JEDEC and how to get DDR to be more popular / competitive). Intel, though, is probably doing this in a choke move for AMD, so it puts Intel at a tough decision point again: open standard = AMD can use it too, or RAMBUS version 2. That said, Intel isn't stupid, I am guessing their upcoming processors will be designed around a high memory bandwidth architecture to take advantage of it better than what competitors can. The low turnaround time (i.e. no bus turnaround!) is so sexy in a geeky way. circuit board designers are going to get soooo much headache over this though...

    * the concept is indeed pretty cool, though you'll need some tough lil drivers that can handle incoming voltage swings while it's driving. The power dissipation on these I/O buffers are key, but in reality these things already exist, of course - just a bit pricy.

    • Re:RAMBUS is so dead (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Best ID Ever! ( 712255 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:44PM (#8312281)
      Actually it's more like RAMBUS has *been* dead ever since DDR / DDR2 became competitive in terms of prices.

      I think you mean RDRAM is dead. RAMBUS, the company, is still very much alive thanks to this ruling, which allows them to extort royalties for SDRAM.
    • I wonder if Intel will learn a lesson from RAMBUS's demise

      Wasn't Intel part and parcel of the rambus problem? IIRC they owned a major stake of the company which was deeded to them so they would SUPPORT Rambus technologies so Rambus could extort people? Wasn't it only after consumers collectively said "Fuck that shit" that Intel stopped producing Rambus motherboards?

      • Re:RAMBUS is so dead (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I believe that consumers collectively said "You want me to pay what for what??"

        The RDRAM modules were sky high expensive and the Intel mobos weren't cheap either. Until the cheaper DDR modules came along there simply wasn't an affordable fast memory design on the market.

      • That's right, it was a collaboration of RAMBUS(T) and INTEL to monopolize the memory market. Too bad, so sad, they lost. Anybody remember IBM and their MCA plans?

    • Nothing special in the drivers. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @11:11PM (#8312453) Journal
      the concept is indeed pretty cool, though you'll need some tough lil drivers that can handle incoming voltage swings while it's driving.

      No you don't. You already need to drive a line that's got a charge on it from the stuff you previously drove onto it. This doesn't change that. The local end just sees the far end as being terminated by a resistor to a voltage that is either low or high, rather than being terminated by a resistor to a constant voltage.

      Driving both ways simultaneously, though, is very cute.

      The downside is the need to daisy-chain. That means you're driving multiple lines at 3.6 Gbps on EVERY chip, ALL THE TIME. That's a LOT of power. Even if you interrupt the daisy chain at the selected chip (and arrange things so that the quiescent states of the transmitters at both ends of an idle line match) it's still a lot of power unless you localize most of your memory access to the closest chip.
      • It looks like Moore's Law is outstripping demand when it comes to RAM; most computers only have one DIMM per channel, in which case you wouldn't even need daisy-chaining. If you want lots of RAM you pay the cost in power.
      • interesting on the syncing quiescent states; because this is perfect for memory - you expect everything that you are about to receive; memory never interrupts the controllers; and all timing parameters are pre-determined. shy maybe maybe DQS and refresh, but not really so much.

        this thing would be more painful to work on chip to chip communications since you don't know if the other chip is Z or the logic state you are receiving simply corresponded with your current driving logic state. (I suppose one can al

        • No Zs here. (Score:4, Informative)

          by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @02:40AM (#8313474) Journal
          this thing would be more painful to work on chip to chip communications since you don't know if the other chip is Z or the logic state you are receiving simply corresponded with your current driving logic state. (I suppose one can always send a enable / disable signal similar to DQS along with a dataline to indicated if it's active)

          You have two misconceptions about the scheme in question:

          1) There is no "Z" state. Both sides are ALWAYS driving.

          2) You don't have to stop driving the line to receive what the other side is driving toward you.

          This is essentially the same hack that lets a telephone send energy at the same band of frequencies in both directions simultaneously, on a single pair of wires:

          - You terminate the line at, or near, its characteristic impedence, and so does the device at the far end.
          - You inject a current into the line/terminator junction (or, equivalently, shift the voltage at the "cold" end of the terminating resistor) to send.
          - You compare the voltage on the pin (or current through the pin, or current through the terminating resistor) to what you expected to see if the far end was at a no-current-injected (or terminator "cold" end at ground) state. The difference is the signal being injected at the far end.

          The wire is being driven at both ends at all times (no Zs). You can always tell what the far end is sending, regardless of what you're sending.

          If you chose to send by injecting a voltage at the "cold" end of the terminator, you dissipate no power when both ends are sending the same value. You dissipate a significant amount when both ends are sending opposite signals. But you also dissipate the same amount if the transmitting ends of two separate wires are switched - for the time it takes the signal to propagate and the reflection to come back. If the separation between the transmitter and receiver is more than half the length of a bit time, the quiescent state has both sides driving the same value, and the two ends drive opposite about as often as same, it's a wash.

  • RamBus (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I did that once, didn't get caught either. The driver was freaked though.

  • Business plan (Score:4, Funny)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:28PM (#8312180)
    1.Steal technology from other companies at trade industry conference, and patent it
    2.Sue other companies before its barely in use and make sure nobody uses said technology
    3.Get tied up in legal battles until patent is useless
    4.???
    5.Profit!

  • RAMBUS is now another SCO (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phamNewan ( 689644 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:29PM (#8312188) Journal
    RAMBUS is another company that is dedicated to making its money now through lawyers. Intel thought that they could take more control of PC design my picking a patented memory structure, and RAMBUS was the perfect lackey ito accomplish this. Their contract with RAMBUS would have had RAMBUS paying Intel back once RDRAM sales exceeded a certain amount. It was a win-win for those two companies, and lose-lose for everyone else due to higher long term prices for all users, and manufacturers.

    The reason for this is the RDRAM design. It takes more space on a wafer to produce, and that is why it costs more ( commission to to RAMBUS is another part, but the size difference is the key cost difference ). So memory prices would have been much higher, and Intel would have been able to squeeze AMD more due to the patented bus that RDRAM uses.

    If you go back in time, it was exactly as Intel was about to force RDRAM down everyones throats, that AMD released the Athlon. Suddenly there was an alternative to Intel in performance, and by not using RDRAM, the price difference was extreme. This is the point that AMD surged ahead in market share, and while the inroads they made were overall not significant, they were enough to show that not everyone would be pushed around.

    RAMBUS did come up with some interesting design innovations, but as soon as the writing on the wall was that RDRAM was dead due to lower prices with DDR, they turned into SCO by suing everyone that was making DDR, by use of info they had taken from JEDEC and adding it after the fact to pending patents from RDRAM. Another stellar example of USPTO excellence. RAMBUS is dead, but someone wants to make money from the rotting corpse. Just compare how similar the lawyers fees are for RAMBUS and SCO.

    • For them to be like SCO, they should have threatened to sue customers which purchased Athlons with DDR, and ridiculously claim that "The only reason your system is so fast is because your memory has our IP in it; those underpaid AMD designers couldn't possibly have done a good system design just by themselves" (and not because you have a state-of-the-art processor ...)
    • Speaking of the "steallar" USPTO: who is the commissioner of this PoS? Political appointee or a committee of morons? Where do we petition for their resignation? (I think it's a good idea... Recall the USPTO!!!!)

    • The reason for this is the RDRAM design. It takes more space on a wafer to produce, and that is why it costs more ( commission to to RAMBUS is another part, but the size difference is the key cost difference ).

      Well, to clarify a little bit...
      The other factor in DDR being much cheaper than RDRAM is that DDR (which is DDR SDRAM) is just an incremental change to the basic SDRAM design--a few extra circuits added, and you're done. RDRAM is a totally different kind of design. You have to basically redesign the

  • Shouldn't the subject read... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by lauterm ( 655930 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @10:45PM (#8312288)
    Shouldn't the subject read "FTC Complaint Against Rambus Dismmissed" instead of "FTC Dismisses Complaint Against Rambus". The title as it currently reads almost made me think the FTC wasn't all that bad. Then I read the body. Oh well, back to hating the FTC.

  • They'll just amend a current application (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    An interesting, possibly coincidental item is that Intel just today announced a new and very powerful DRAM interface that bypasses Rambus IP altogether.

    So? I'm sure Rambus has a patent application in the pipeline that they'll just amend to include Intel's latest technology.

  • Precendence? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Supp0rtLinux ( 594509 ) <Supp0rtLinux@yahoo.com> on Tuesday February 17, 2004 @11:25PM (#8312547)
    So does this mean the recent Pentium suits [zdnet.co.uk] will be thrown out too???

    The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers [nccomp.com]
  • Seeing that the company is lawsuit-happy I'm suprised the industry hasn't completely underwritten them by now. Unless Rambus signed some huge or long term contracts with the motherboard makers, then simply stopping production of boards supporting their memory would bankrupt them quickly.

    I trust they won't be part of the JEDEC and its meetings now.

    Incidentally, Rambus is one of the few tech companies where when you type in the company name in a search engine you get the company website .. and .. then a who
    • I wonder if Rambus is being kept afloat by the PlayStation 2. It isn't used in more than a handful of PC motherboards and I imagine there aren't too many Alpha EV7 and Cray X1 systems being sold.

  • Not the end (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nezroy ( 84641 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @01:26AM (#8313241) Homepage
    Something glossed over by the article (and Rambus), but very important, is that this isn't anything even remotely like the end of the FTC investigation into this.

    "Today's ruling came after a three-month evidentiary hearing and is subject to potential further review by the full Commission and review by a United States Court of Appeal."

    and

    "The Judge's initial decision is subject to review by the full Commission, either on its own motion or at the request of either party."

    Basically one judge threw out the preliminary suit brought by a small commitee of the FTC. The case will now almost certainly go before the full FTC and, unlike an appeals process, this will involve a complete reexamination of the body of evidence. Essentially there will be a second, independent judgement by the FTC again on this matter, with potentially (and hopefully) differing results.
  • The ALJ just ruled that the case is dismissed from his point of view, but this is not an all out victory as RamBus is claiming already. What will happen next is the FTC counsel will take this matter to the full FTC Commission and they will make their own full investigation. Unlike an appeals court process where the judge can only look to see what was wrong, the FTC can fully investigate the entire claim all over again, then deal out their punishments as they see fit.

    But then again, IANAL.

  • Was this FTC suit based on their violation of the JEDEC non-compete over SDRAM? Did that document just not hold up in court? Why?

    I thought that was long gone...or is this a completely different issue?

  • Open Standards (Score:3, Informative)

    by salesgeek ( 263995 ) on Wednesday February 18, 2004 @10:54AM (#8315499) Homepage
    Having been in the business since 1988,I've seen all kinds of ideas like Rambus come and go. Generally, the idea is:

    * Create an "essential" technology that is implemented in several large manufacturer's products.
    * License the technology to everyone for big $

    Most often what happens is that for a year or two, the "essential technology" may actually be very successful. Sometimes it even sticks around for the long haul, but the price becomes a lot lower. Then someone else comes out with "The Next Big Thing" or an open standard with simmilar functionality comes into existence. Some examples that are easy to remember:

    * IBM's Microchannel Archetecture (was very cool for about two years, displaced by eisa, bus mastering ISA, then PCI)
    * Adobe Postscript, Type 1 Fonts
    * Zip drives

    Rambus isn't essential any more... but they'll be aroud as much as I don't like them.
  • Hmm. I don't think fixed disks are going to be replaced any time soon. What could happen is wider use of clustering technology using computationaly fast diskless clients with loads of RAM, hooked up to a few server nodes with fixed disks for permanant storage and in case of power outages.

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