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Preliminary Ruling Limits Scope of Rambus Patents 124

Posted by Hemos from the good-thing-to-hear dept.
Tackhead writes "According to this article in Electronic News, Rambus - our favorite litiga, uh, innovators in DRAM technology - has been smacked with a preliminary ruling that limits their patent claims to RAM technologies involving a multiplex bus. The article goes on to quote a source who says that since neither SDRAM nor DDR use this technique, this ruling could lead to the invalidation of RAMBUS' patent claims on SDRAM and DDR. Of course, this is just a preliminary ruling, and it's only one court battle (out of at least three), but it looks like the Good Guys (well, at the guys whose business is based on making chips instead of suing chipmakers) just might be winning."
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Preliminary Ruling Limits Scope of Rambus Patents More

Preliminary Ruling Limits Scope of Rambus Patents

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  • My understanding is that all the royalties are (retroactively) based on the patents holding up. No patents = money being returned, etc. Now if I could only remember where I read it...

  • Re:competition underway... (Score:3)

    by Pedrito ( 94783 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:22AM (#361496)
    Rambus is pretty much screwed because of this. Okay, they still have a few more trials, but my guess is that they're going to lose, and obviously a lot of their investors do to (at this moment, they're down 25%).

    Intel has made their intentions clear. They will not be using RDRAM for future chips and will likely not work with Rambus in the future. Intel's not real happy about the lawsuits and they're definately not happy about the price gouging by Rambus. It hurts Intel's business to have to rely on RDRAM. The memory is so expensive, people don't want to use the motherboards.

    Rambus has about the worst PR of any tech company because of the suits and because of the prices. Personally, I doubt they'll recover. They've really put themselves into a bad spot and I don't think they can dig out, but that's just MHO.



  • Does this *REALLY* deserve a 4? I mean, come on moderators! Now a days, almost every Slashdot article starts out with a 4 or 5 moderated "Funny" post, which often aren't that funny. Yet, somehow, extremely important posts that are full of information that is actually *applicable* to the Slashdot article never get moderated up at all!!

    I like funny stuff like the next guy, but I don't come here because this is a humour site. I come here because this site offers interesting intellectual discussions about topics that are applicable to me today. Somehow, I just don't think the moderators get that, and it's only getting worse as time goes on.

    The humour posts SHOULD be moderated up, but ABSOLUTELY NOT at the expensive of the other more serious posts that actually pertain to the discussion.

    How much do you want to bet this post never gets moderated above a 1 or gets marked as flame bait?
  • Ever hear of sarcasm? Its quite an old feature.. Btw, look at your karma, and you'll see the troll.

  • RAMBUS Stock (Score:5)

    by kreyg ( 103130 ) <kreyg@shawREDHAT.ca minus distro> on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:54AM (#361499) Homepage
    Their stock [yahoo.com] declined 26% today.

    Hehe. Ouch.
  • While I agree with what you say, let's not forget the opportunity costs. I'm sure 5 million dollars in research could be used more effectively (and profitably) in suing companies for patent and copyright infringements, no matter how ridiculous the arguments may seem. Both R&D and lawsuits have risk factors on whether or not the company can profit from such actions. I'm guessing it costs less to sue over patent/copyright infringement, than to R&D a whole new technology from the ground up. (Which it seems Rambus would have to do to fix their current situation).
  • On the trivial part:

    Why can't the patent reviewer call ??SU, with a which has a department that is well known for the technology that the patent covers. The reviewer ask to speak to a professor in that department. He ask the professor how (s)he would solve a problem covered by the patent. If the professor can describe within a ten-minute cold call the method covered by the patent, then it is trivial.

    I think this would kill most of the high tech patents being given out today, because the patents only describe the obvious way to do something with a computer. (ie, it's patentable just because it is done by a computer seems to be acceptable by the USPTO)

  • You're right, it is dependent on certain factors. However, what you outline is a rare case in terms of all of computerdom. A situation such as this does not arise for probably any more than 1% of the population of users with x86 based hardware.

    Furtermore, a RAM upgrade does not mean that you are forced to use RDRAM. It just means a RAM upgrade vs. a processor upgrade. Your confusing your statement.

    PS. aren't per processor license scheme's frighteningly evil? <shudder>

    -- kwashiorkor --
    Leaps in Logic
    should not be confused with

  • His link is invalid. I suppose its the dynamic servers over at Bloomberg [bloomberg.com]. You will see an article there that says there was NO ruling yesterday. The ElectronicNews was WRONG [bloomberg.com].
  • Well, not exactly. The article (in Bloomberg) says "no official order has been made" but that one is expected to come out later today.

    The clear inference is that the order has been leaked, and the leak is reasonably accurate.

  • The way I userstand the situation, Rambus did closer to #2 than #1. The group they joined with other RAM makers said that you couldn't patent the things the group decided on and that you couldn't suggest a standard patented by your company. The reason for these rules are obvious. Rambus went to the conference and either suggested, or allowed another party to suggest, standards that Rambus had a patent *pending* on. Since the patent was pending, when anyone from the group did a check on the standards, nothing came up. Then all of the sudden, after everyone starts implementing the decisions made by the group, poof, Rambus has a patent on it. It's definately one of the scummiest business deals I've seen.

    -B
  • "The Chip Connection Specialists. We Never Stop Innovating." -- Rambus.com

    "Microsoft strives to produce innovative products..." -- Microsoft.com

    For people learning english, they might think the word "innovation" means "to stick a honkin' corporate phallus up the customer's ass".
  • According to an article over at Bloomberg [bloomberg.com], there was no ruling yesterday.

    It seems Bloombergs servers make it difficult to link directly to the article [bloomberg.com], and this info is pseudo redundant since I got it from an AC below, who isn't being modded up.

  • Huh? You said:

    "One might be tricked into believing a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents, when in reality, it only means that a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents."

    You are saying the same thing twice and saying they are different. In the first part of that sentence, you say:

    a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents

    And then you say, in the same sentence:

    a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents

    So, if we make
    X = "a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents"
    and
    Y = "a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents"

    Then obviously X = Y, but you are saying X != Y ???

    'Psuedo program to illustate my point
    If (X == Y) {
    C = X
    }

    So, we could say "One might be tricked into believing [%= C %], when in reality, it only means that [%= C %].

    WTF??

  • Actually, the price of RAM in general has taken a major nosedive lately.

    I can now get 128 MB DDR-SDRAM DIMM's for under US$80! =:-0 And it appears that the RDRAM makers have a clue, too: 128 MB PC-800 RIMM's now sell for under US$150. (Thud)

    Maybe the competition from DDR-SDRAM has finally forced the price of RIMM's down for a change. :-)
  • About the same thing that happened to the other .com shareholders ;-)
  • There was a profit warning issued yesterday (the 14th) when the news of Judge Payne's decision broke. The markets aren't usually to savvy about what's going on in a company, but they sure pay attention to analysts projections on a core dump on earnings.

    --


  • How much do you want to bet this post never gets moderated above a 1 or gets marked as flame bait?

    Yet another example of the stupidity of most moderators. Offtopic, yet. Flamebait, possibly. This post is most certainly NOT a troll.

    I hope this one comes up in metamod

  • He-he, they aren't THAT desperate I guess. Unless some of them are Russians, eh? ;-)
  • can be found here. [cnet.com] BTW, their stock was down almost $12 USD the last time I checked. I guess that RAMBUS losing is a bad thing for their market cap...

  • Reluctant to admit their mistake? As far back as Tom's initial exhaustive review and benchmark of the P4 [tomshardware.com], he stated,
    This proves clearly that Pentium 4 lives from the high memory bandwidth that RDRAM is finally able to deliver.
    Even though the floating point of the P4 was benchmarked in the initial article as being abysmal, he had a positive word for the RDRAM memory bandwidth.

    As to pricing and bundling, why would we WANT DDR2100 bundled with an Athlon? Most people who are willing to pop enough for a brand new Athlon or P4 and RAM don't WANT to get it bundled. They want the most flexibility in choosing all of their parts to make sure they get the best possible. Honestly you sound like a Microsoft marketing guy - remember getting it bundled is always better! Now that may be a matter of opinion but I happen to be a highly opinionated individual and I personally think bundling can bite my big white monkey. But I digress. I'm responding to your facts, not railing M$. I'll have to do that another day.

    Yes, this is real performance on real motherboards and yes someone finally did design a decent controller with enough power. The latency problem is still there though. AFAIK they are doing interleave to somewhat sidestep the problem, which actually isn't too bad of a solution. However remember it took them QUITE a long time to make that decent controller and the incomplete versions were released to the market with large flaws. Intel isn't the only company to ever have done that but my point is that they DID do it, and deserve to be berated for it just as much or little as any other company. We personally have about 500 brand new cp's at the company I work for, all with RDRAM. The controllers on these boards were so bad that we eventually ended up having to replace all the boards to get then to run correctly. Once they were running, they've run fairly reliably (aside from other hardware problems not associated with Intel or Rambus). But be that as it may I still don't really like them. My system at home is only slightly clock speed faster than these but it would whoop the pc's at work any day, even with simple old PC-133 SDRAM. I'm not saying this as official benchmark stuff, simply that I'm not satisfied with RDRAM so far.

    And as to the subject of cooling, yes people strab mammoth heat sinks to their processors. It's become somewhat of a sport for the daring/rich. However cooling RAM is an entirely different issue. For one thing, RDRAM runs so hot just clocked normally that it has to go into different sleep states to avoid basiclaly melting itself. This is a big part of what's behind the large latency associated with RDRAM. And since they're running so hot already, this seriously inhibits your ability to overclock your bus (the only way to overclock a P4 anyway). Cooling your RAM is very difficult even if you did want to do it because most of it is mounted perpendicular to the board, as opposed to the CPU that is now mounted parallel. And when the cpu's WERE mounted perpendicular, there had to be a large amount of clear space around it to fit the heat sink/fan, space that really couldn't be used for much else. You could blow a fan on the mem, but this defintely isn't the most efficient way. So they left in the sleep modes and the overclocking is limited...in other words the heat problem really does remain, just not really in a form you and I deal with.

    I hope this was an acceptable response to your facts as you posted them. I sincerely enjoyed the intellectual discussion. :)
  • If only i had the points to mod this "Funny"
  • Go read and post on Raging Bull's or Motley Fool's [fool.com] RMBS boards. You think /. gets a bit high strung at times, you ain't seen nothin' 'til you've seen longs and shorts going at each other. They have money on the line, you know. :)

    Now Fool keeps the boards civil, at least as far as language goes, but not Raging Bull.

    If you're the type who likes to throw gasoline onto a fire, here's a bonfire just waiting for you to back up the fuel tanker.

  • ThTe problem is precisely the whole triviality clause.

    I think it's about time we banned patenting of things which are necessary by definition in inventions. Like flammable liquids in combustion engines. To be patentable it should be necessary by innovation not by definition of the task it performs.
  • I believe it's mentioned in Revelation along with when the sun will become blood red and dogs and cats playing together. But imho this is a LONG time in coming. I'm really even surprised that the judge based a ruling on such a technical issue - it shows you that there really ARE judges out there willing to wade through the technical stuff and issue judgements (or at least injunctions) on it. Now as to whether or not this will continue, we'll see. I just pray to god it will!

  • Re:competition underway... (Score:4)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:24AM (#361520)
    > Well, even if RAMBUS loses this case altogether, there is still the competition between DDR and RDRAM. Who will win this battle is completely unknown.

    Yup. RDRAM is pretty clearly a Rambus innovation, and I don't begrudge them their royalties on RDRAM sales.

    There's nothing intrinsically evil about saying "we invent things and license the tech to people who want to build them". It's only when Rambus said "Oh yeah, all your RAM are belong to us!" that I think they crossed the line from being innovators into being litigators.

    If you invent something, you can license it. My beef with Rambus is that I don't believe they had anything to do with the "invention" of SDRAM or DDR, and that they therefore have no legitimate claim to royalties on those products.

    If Rambus makes a fortune because Intel ships a CPU/chipset combo that turns the performance potential of RDRAM into real-world advantages, and their technology gains marketshare from DDR, more power to 'em.

    But if the world goes with DDR instead of RDRAM, then Rambus (IMHO) should either come up with something better than DDR and patent it, or stick a fork in itself, 'cuz it's done.

  • Maybe I am out of line for thinking this... (Score:3)

    by fantom_winter ( 194762 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:24AM (#361521)
    I know that /. is largely a club/message board kind of place more than it is a news organization, but "Good Guys" ? ?? Don't get me wrong. From what I can tell, RAMBUS are a bunch of jerks. From what I know, I agree with the sentiment in the article, but sometimes I would like to see a bit less bias in the articles themselves. The reason is that it makes the source of some of my knowledge of current events suspect. Can I trust Slashdot to paint a fair picture of a situation when they post a story about it? Not always...

    In this case, I am wondering what RAMBUS is thinking.. Why are they doing this? Are they truly just a bunch of jerks? Why do they feel that they have rights to some of this technology? I mean, certainly someone there thinks they have a case. The more I read /., the more I think that all these companies are evil demons trying to take away my liberties and other people's hard work. Is this truly an accurate assessment? Surely someone can speak for RAMBUS to explain why they think that they are in the right on this matter.

  • It's a heavily biased piece, as well. Not many fans of Rambus on /. but they haven't lost, as of this writing, it's still pre-trial and there'a always appeals.

    The DDR patent still may hold water, as IIRC it was specific concerning the placement of a register in the memory. I think the JEDEC/RICO prospects are interesting, considering conflicting information coming out.

    --

  • "Quite misleading. One might be tricked into believing a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents, when in reality, it only means that a preliminary ruling limited the scope of Rambus patents."

    Problem is that it didn't limit the SCOPE of any patent. It merely said that, most likely (remember its a preliminary ruling), RAMBUS's patent doesn't even apply in the case of SDRAM. No "limiting of scope" and no invalidation of any part of the patent, just a Judge being safe and agreeing with an "expert" that RAMBUS has no patent on SDRAM.

  • Actually ... (Score:4)

    by overshoot ( 39700 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:27AM (#361524)
    it doesn't quite shut down the Rambus litigation machine. Besides the totally bogus stuff, they do have a patent on variable CAS latency in the DRAM. One could argue that this was obvious, since everyone and her sister was using controller-side variable CAS latency from 'way back when. Regardless, they have the patent and it does seem to bear directly on SDRAM and DDR.

    DDR II, on the other hand, has had it designed out. Dang.
  • If you bothered to read further you should see that payments in some cases were contingent upon Rambus defending their patents. Consider, also, whether the "Dramurai" who fell used the Rambus Multiplex Bus or not.

    --

  • Do consumers want or need a P4 with RDRAM? Will AMD continue to take market share, thereby boosting DDR sales? Will RDRAM prices come down? Will DDR chipsets finally ship in volume? And which technology really works better?

    Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion!!

  • The truth is, we just don't know. There are a bunch of companies who adopted standards that were ratified by a standards organization that Rambus belonged to. The rules of the organization stated specifically that members could not include (or allow to be included) concepts for which they owned the patents, at least not without saying something. Nobody knows for sure, but Rambus appears to have violated these rules; furthermore, there are emails between company officials that seem to indicate that Rambus did this knowingly, and expected that it would be in their business interests (today's stock meltdown [yahoo.com] is a good indication of how much it matters.) This is all aside from the fraud charges, which are murky.

    Of course, there are people who will disagree and say that Rambus didn't actually violate the rules of the organization (rules are subjective, after all). But the only people who can really speak to Rambus' state of mind are the people who are accused of these actions, and they're not going to talk. I'd venture to say that beyond the litigants, only the courts really know the whole story. If they do end up issuing a final ruling against Rambus, it'll mean that there was a pretty clear cut case.

  • Re:Phrasing of headline is misleading. (Score:3)

    by StevenMaurer ( 115071 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:27AM (#361528) Homepage

    Having 10 patents myself, I know a little about this business.

    "There goes their patent" is actually a better phrasing of it. You can patent anything unique you invent - the trick is to patent something valuable - e.g. something the market actually wants.

    RAMBUS went on this strategy of suing SDRAM makers because their own technology turned out to be inferior [tomshardware.com], offering massively higher price with no matching performance gain.

    If RAMBUS is unable to enforce their patent against SDRAM, then the patent is - from a business standpoint - worthless. All it could be used for is preventing unauthorized copies of RAMBUS memory, which most customers don't want anyway.

  • Re:Maybe I am out of line for thinking this... (Score:3)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:58AM (#361529)
    > but "Good Guys" ? ?? Don't get me wrong. From what I can tell, RAMBUS are a bunch of jerks.

    As you point out - it's /. The side with the most IP lawyers is automatically not the "good guys" :-)

    > Why are they doing this? Are they truly just a bunch of jerks? Why do they feel that they have rights to some of this technology?

    1) To make money because they ain't gettin' enough from RDRAM sales to keep their investors happy.

    2) Yes they are, but that's not important ;-)

    3) IMHO, they're grasping at straws (e.g. programmable latency) to support their case because they see RDRAM going away in favor of DDR. If they can get their hands on royalties from DDR and SDRAM, they make big bucks for their shareholders.

    I see "making big bucks for their shareholders" as a legitimate business activity of any company. It just so happens that the way in which this company is going about it (i.e. trying to extend a patent intended to cover RDRAM into SDRAM and DDR after you've realized that your RDRAM tech isn't gonna take over the world the way you thought it was) happens to make them look like a bunch of jerks.

  • RMBS (Score:1)

    by Mongoose ( 8480 )
    From cnbc.com:

    Price: 25.21 (-28.68%) 1:34pm ET
    Range: 25.0 - 35.73
    Vol : 14,973,400
    P/E : 86.931

    Me thinks rambus is due to die... a P/E that high is laughable in light of possible loss of main source of revenue. =)
  • ATTENTION

    This story has been denied as patently false by all players involved. Please see this post [slashdot.org] and the Bloomberg article here [bloomberg.com]. I am posting this specifically because the above post is languishing at 0 while 10,000 idiots are either celebrating or frothing and foaming about a news story which isn't even true.

    Thanks, cunts!

    Love,
    Slashfucker

  • New moderators are assigned daily. With their 5 fresh new shiny mod points showing up next to every single post, the urge to spend them outweighs common sense. The same thing happened to me. If you do not use them soon they dissapear and you become a Normal User (tm) again. What happens is that the first three or four posts with +2 karma show up first, and are the first to get the mod points. It does not matter in the slightest what the content is.
  • Considering that DDR is faster and cheaper than Rambus, there is really no competition. It's just a matter of availability.
    ___

  • Re:Malda's RMBS fixation. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Herr Pabst and all the other little bedroom reviewers are also reluctant to admit their mistake. It's almost funny to see the P4/Rambus with double the memory performance in every test they perform, yet somehow they never mention those articles they all wrote months before about the shitful performance of Rambus in the real world and the imminent death of RMBS. Still, what do you expect from a bunch of schoolkids whose idea of measuring motherboard stability is to count capacitors. I suppose they think an ENIAC is faster than an Athlon too, after all, look at all those valves!

    It's not even very expensive any more - compare the price of Rambus and DDR2100 memory. Do you get DDR2100 memory bundled with a rev.C Athlon? No - but you do get Rambus with a Pentium 4. Yet do we even see much response to these facts when I post them? No, just lots of red-faced /. readers content to let the /. editors think for them

    This is real world performance, on real motherboards, running real tests. I guess somehow someone did design a decent controller, and provided enough power, and overcame the latency problem. Extreme coolers? Just take a look at what people are strapping to their CPUs these days. Herr Pabst even awards first place to the biggest of the lot, the Swiftech MC462 in the latest test. That's no obstacle in a modern machine.

    It looks like your sig is true, at least as far as you are concerned.
  • The whole existence of RAMBUS is 'bogus.' They lie, cheat and steal better than most, with every drop of revenue undeserved. They are so good at it, they even victimized Intel and all the OEMs who have to contractually sell RAM-CRUD memory. Meanwhile, while this guy reams Micron, I can go buy a 256MB ECC CL=2 PC133 DIMM for 90 bucks from them. I love them. You can barely find a 256MB RIMM - and you will always pay over $350 for it, and it sucks. The good thing is now the OEMs are using ServerWorks wherever they can to screw Intel and RAMBUS, and to give the customer more memory for the money. (Even though they still enjoy a good raping, we get cheap memory.)
  • Just a few week's ago [cnet.com] - whether due to the greed that got them into this mess, or the pride of not being able to admit a mistake, or whatever.
  • The reason why Rambus has to win this lawsuit is plainly for survival. If you look at Rambus' latest quarterly financial report at http://biz.yahoo.com/e/l/r/rmbs.html , you'll find that royalties constotuted 77.3% of thir revenues in the quarter ended Dec 31. Without these royalties, Rambus' would be pulling in just a little over 1/5th of their current revenues. That would make Rambus the stock hugely overvalued even at current prices. If you belive Rambus is going to lose the lawsuit, it's probably still not too late to short the stock :)
  • >Am I the only one to notice that no one even >tries to defend Rambus on a technological basis >anymore

    Maybe its because the people who actually know about the various memory technologies are tired on explaning over and over the exact same thing to people who probably have no clue what they are talking about, but read somewhere that "insert product here" sucks and therefore is bad.

    DRDRAM has significant advantages over SDR SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, DDR-II SDRAM and are roughly the same power. Anyone saying otherwise either hasn't looked at the issues or doesn't know what they are talking about(This included a lot of the hardware review sites, but what do you expect when you get your technical information from a Jr High school student.)

  • 10% is not likely. Calculate this:

    RDRAM - PC600, 16 bit
    SDRAM - PC133, 64 bit

    600 x 16 = 9600
    133 x 64 = 8152

    Now imagine DDR SDRAM, which is almost twice as fast since it reads and writes at the same time. RDRAM is just not worth it.

  • Why does this rumor keep going around. If you look at the actual data sheets for DRDRAM AND DDR SDRAM you find that they both have roughly the same power consumption. Just take a look at Samsung's data sheets.

    Think before you spew.
  • Didn't take long for that lame-ass FP to get modded down.

  • haha, now close to 32% at the days close.

    interesting to note that there is NO actually ruling, all this selling is fired up by speculation.

    one more note: options for RMBS shares surge today.

  • Well if you'd been following the technology of RAMBUS and actually READING the reviews that you mentioned, you'd know that while RDRAM has wonderful bandwidth, it has horrible latency, heat, power, and timing problems. They've known about all of these problems since RDRAM came out and they're painfully obvious now. It may have oodles of more bandwidth than sdram BUT if the latency is bad or if you can't power it or design a decent chipset/memory controller for it, it's really worthless except possibly at the high end server market where people are willing to pay oodles of $$ for extreme bandwidth with massive cooling solutions.


    And you know all this because:

    A: you read it on some hardware site?
    B: you read it on usenet?
    C: you are the urban legend spambot?

    First of all the power of DRDRAM is roughly the same as DDR DRAM, in fact, depending of the configurations DRDRAM can generate less heat. Go read data sheet and stop reading usenet and hardware review sites. It is true that an individual chip on a rambus channel can get hot, but the other chips will be generating almost no heat. The heat spreader is there to spread heat and keep all the chips at a roughly even temperature.

    As far as latency is concerned, the benchmarks on latency with PC chipsets show that depending on the chipset DRDRAM is better or worth than CL2 SDR SDRAM. So again there is no real fact behind the supposed higher latencies of DRDRAM. The overall differences in latencies are once again well overblown, with the highest variable in latency of a system being the chipset.
  • So just rename your technology something else and call it revolutionary...
    Worked for MS
  • sometimes I would like to see a bit less bias in the articles themselves. The reason is that it makes the source of some of my knowledge of current events suspect. Can I trust Slashdot to paint a fair picture of a situation when they post a story about it? Not always...
    Keep in mind that what you see on the /. frontpage is not an article. It is a link to an article and some guy's commentary. Of course, if you don't read the actual article you may have problems determining the facts.
    In this case, I am wondering what RAMBUS is thinking.. Why are they doing this? Are they truly just a bunch of jerks? Why do they feel that they have rights to some of this technology? I mean, certainly someone there thinks they have a case.
    Of course they think they have a legitimate claim. But then those two spammers in the other story today think they didn't do anything illegal. Rambus' behaviour has certainly been morally shady.
  • The real juice in the story wasn't the headline, it was the allowance of the possibility of fraud charges against prominent Rambusteers. If a fraud prosecution were to take place Rambus would completely collapse.
  • Most moderators would agree, probably nobody modded it past 3, but if a few people with mod pages load the page at once they'll see a funny post at 2, so two or three independantly decide to mod it up. When they all do, they find it's at 5.

    Moderation is destined to be a little inaccurate when there's a delay involved like that.

    And that's despite all the moderators who read at 2+, Highest First. All they ever see is the high-rated posts.

    IMHO having moderator points should put you into 0+, nested.

    I wouldn't force 'oldest first', but if anyone moded something 'redundant' while reading in 'newest first' I'd slap them with a tuna.

  • Phrasing of headline is misleading. (Score:3)

    by Auckerman ( 223266 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @07:56AM (#361550)
    When I read the ./ headline and article, my first thought was, "there goes their patent". Then I read the article and reread the headline and it made more sense. Rambus patent hasn't been touched, the Judge has merely sided with an "expert witness" in saying that Rambus's patent doesn't even apply to SDRAM, since SDRAM doesn't use the technology in the patent.
  • If you're in the business where you're licensing something like that you're going to buy more than 512MB of RAM. 2 CPU P3 server vendors recommend 2-4GB, that's $4000 (CDN $) in RAM. In a 4 or 8-way server you're going to want a lot more.

    The prices don't work for RDRAM for *most* things. If you're looking for a fast single CPU to do little except stream data, RDRAM is faster. But if you're worried about latency which is the real issue in any non-contrived server example, then RDRAM doesn't cut it anyways. The extra cost just makes it worse.

    If RAMBUS actually offered performance benefits in those areas, it might justify the price.

    But, if you really care about performance, you don't use x86 and you don't run NT. Sun, SGI, Compaq (Alpha), and IBM are in business for a reason...

  • i'm stunned... (Score:4)

    by Wiggin ( 97119 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @07:53AM (#361552)
    ... sanity entering the US court system? isn't that one of the signs of the end of the world?
  • Sure RAMBUS RAM has significant advantages over just about every other type of ram out there......ON PAPER. IN REAL WORLD CONDITIONS they quickly become significant DISADVANTAGES. Claiming that everyone else is too stupid to understand why RAMBUS RAM is better is pretty insulting and just plain wrong. Ever hear of latency? Yes even Jr. High school students can figure out latency and why their Rambus powered systems are slower than DDR, or SDR powered systems. The hardware review sites a VERY knowledgeable WITHOUT the marketing crap. They simply test the systems in real world conditions, you would think the techs at Rambus would do the same before releasing their crap onto the world. So in short, NO everyone isn't too stupid to see why Rambus is a better technology. They and the rest of the world are smart enough to know its an inferior technology. Even the CEO of Intel himself said so.....why can't YOU see that? NDPTAL85

  • competition underway... (Score:3)

    by MillMan ( 85400 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @07:54AM (#361554)
    Well, even if RAMBUS loses this case altogether, there is still the competition between DDR and RDRAM. Who will win this battle is completely unknown.

    Do consumers want or need a P4 with RDRAM? Will AMD continue to take market share, thereby boosting DDR sales? Will RDRAM prices come down? Will DDR chipsets finally ship in volume? And which technology really works better?

    This battle is far from settled even when excluding the court case. Intel IS going to ship DDR product with the P4, but at a later date, conceiveably after RDRAM is reaching mass acceptance. They are keeping the door open, though. RAMBUS isn't going away soon, if ever.
  • Let's hope this sets a precedent. After all, this "Let's patent this innovative way of shopping and go after everybody that uses a remotely similar method" is getting way out of hand. RAMBUS, Amazon and the like, get a life! Focus on making money by innovating, not patenting and suing innocent bystanders... This RAMBUS trial is moronic, but it still doesn't compare to Caldera buying DR-DOS and suing Microsoft... My favorite quote on that one: "Caldera bought a ticket to sue Microsoft". Sure pal, just stand in line like everybody else, and wait for your turn... --- "Good, bad... I'm the one with the gun!"
  • RDRAM will never be accepted. The prices may have come down, and interleaving may boost its bandwidth sky high, but it still has problems with latency and power consumption. IIRC, DDR consumes even less power than SDRAM, which will also make it appealing in mobile devices, be it necessary or not :)

    (end comment) */ }

  • Unbiased replys:

    they're stupid
    YES
    they're stupid
    YES


  • Re:About time! (Score:3)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:32AM (#361559)
    > So, does this mean that Hitachi, Micron, and everyone else that perviously had to pay Rambus royalties will get their money back? It's about time this bully got its ass beat.

    Probably not. Micron, for instance, never paid Rambus a cent - that's why they're part of another lawsuit ;-)

    If you signed a contract with Rambus that said "we'll pay you a royalty on our SDRAM sales between $NOW and $LATER", well, uh, you signed the contract. Tough.

    Of course, if you signed such a contract, and Rambus' patents turn out to be invalid, odds are you're gonna drive a harder bargain when the contract expires.

    (I suppose that if a judge rules that Rambus knew its patents were invalid at the time it wrote the contract, it may invalidate the contract altogether - but that would require proof of fraudulent intent, which is a much harder thing to prove than anything that's been seen up to this point. Personally, I think there'd be reasonable doubt - Rambus' goons wouldn't have gone on the path of attempting to license DDR and SDRAM unless they had reason to believe they could get away with it. Even if the patents are invalidated, given what's been made public so far, I think Rambus can still credibly claim that they thought their DDR/SDRAM land grab would stand up in court.)

  • Re:competition underway... (Score:3)

    by overshoot ( 39700 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:35AM (#361560)
    Well, even if RAMBUS loses this case altogether, there is still the competition between DDR and RDRAM. Who will win this battle is completely unknown.

    Not really. Servers account for about half of all DRAM shipped, and the server mfgs are unanimous in rejecting Rambus. Likewise video, notebook, and most embedded applications. About the only space that Rambus can come close to competing in is high-end desktop machines.

    As a result, DDR is guaranteed to dominate the volume shipments, which runs the economy-of-scale benefit their way. Bottom line: Rambus has to have a killer advantage of some sort to even stay in the game.

    Right now the only major advantage that Rambus has is that Intel cleverly designed the Pentium IV pipeline around Rambus. Yes, that's right, the P4 is a Rambus-specific processor. Smooth move, Intel.

  • News : No News (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just the Fact's please
    This was FUD
    Here's the link:
    http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?T=marketsqu ot e99_news.ht&s=AOrD1LBRvUmFtYnVz

    Quote:
    Rambus Shares Fall After Web Site's Report on Patent Trial
    By John Stebbins

    Los Altos, California, March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Rambus Inc. shares fell as much as 28 percent after a computer-news Web site, citing unnamed industry sources, reported that a U.S. judge had limited the memory-chip maker's patent-infringement lawsuit against Germany's Infineon Technologies AG.

    Rambus Chief Financial Officer Gary Harmon said no official ruling had been made, although one might come out later today. Infineon attorney Robert Tyler, of the Richmond law firm McGuireWoods LLP, agreed.

    ElectronicNews Online, published by Reed Elsevier Inc.'s Cahners Business Information division, said U.S. District Judge Robert Joyce issued his ruling yesterday in Richmond, Virginia.

    ``The fact is, no order was issued yesterday,'' Tyler said. ``We have been hearing that something would be coming out soon, probably today. I don't know what sources Cahners is citing.''

    Rambus shares plunged $8.47 to $26.88 in midday trading after dropping as low as $25.60.

  • > Rambus patent hasn't been touched, the Judge has merely sided with an "expert witness" in saying that Rambus's patent doesn't even apply to SDRAM, since SDRAM doesn't use the technology in the patent.

    Yeah, the headline (which I wrote) is a bit misleading. I'd hoped I'd cleared it up in the "article text" by mentioning that (a) it's a preliminary ruling, and (b) the judge hasn't concluded that DDR and SDRAM don't use a multiplex bus -- only a source in the article.

    So two things have to happen: (1) The judge has to agree that neither DDR nor SDRAM use a multiplex bus, and (2) The judge has to remain convinced that Rambus' patent does not extend beyond the multiplex bus.

    Although this ruling is a blow for Rambus, it's not the end. If the Rambus landsharks can sway the judge on either of these two points, they can still win.

  • Am I missing something here? Why did Hitachi sign licensing agreements with RAMBUS? I thought they were fighting RAMBUS and with this favorable finding, I'd think they definately wouldn't sign. With most of the companies signing with RAMBUS, what's the guarantee any of the ones fighting RAMBUS will stick with it long enough to come to a proper resolution instead of signing these licensing agreements?

    Khyron

  • The Best Part... (Score:3)

    by Trekologer ( 86619 ) <adb@trekologer. n e t> on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:40AM (#361564) Homepage
    From the article...

    If individuals are convicted of fraud, it could mean more than a financial slap on the wrist, sources said.

    "This means that people could go to jail. That's what this means," the source said.

    And they should be thrown in jail. RAMBUS obviously committed fraud by going into the JEDEC standards meeting knowing that that the standard reached would infringe on their patents, not notifying JEDEC that they were patent pending on technoligies that were in the standard and then modifying their patent applications to cover even more of the agreed upon standard. Hell, RAMBUS management deserves more than jailtime; they deserve to be drawn and quarterd. Maybe this (throwing RAMBUS employees and lawyers) into jail would discourage others from attempting to follow RAMBUS's litigeous lead.
  • I absolutely agree. I thought it was funny, but i don't think it deserves a 5. Maybe a 3, but not a 5. I do think that moderators tend to overlook lots of informative, serious posts deserving of mod points. But the question is, how do you fix it?
  • Well if you'd been following the technology of RAMBUS and actually READING the reviews that you mentioned, you'd know that while RDRAM has wonderful bandwidth, it has horrible latency, heat, power, and timing problems. They've known about all of these problems since RDRAM came out and they're painfully obvious now. It may have oodles of more bandwidth than sdram BUT if the latency is bad or if you can't power it or design a decent chipset/memory controller for it, it's really worthless except possibly at the high end server market where people are willing to pay oodles of $$ for extreme bandwidth with massive cooling solutions.
  • Not quite correct: /. is a place for people who match the description you give and for people who delight in bashing them. Any given article I read has plenty of examples of both groups.
  • How much do you want to bet this post never gets moderated above a 1 or gets marked as flame bait?

    Please, no more reverse-psychology endings. They've been overdone.

  • what's going to happen now with all Rambus shareholders?

  • Sadly, sometimes price per performance does justify that kind of expense. An example is for servers running software with very high per-processor license fees. If I'm paying a $25,000 per processor license fee, it makes sense to spend $1000 on faster RAM to get a 10% increase in per-processor performance. Of course it might make more sense to plow that money into a different processor (or software without insane licensing fees) but the point is still there.

  • Their stock is dropping because they're being sued for artificial stock inflation. That's actually two ways it's dropping. One by being sued, and secondly by the deflation.

  • Well, your link is not reachable right now leading me to wonder if it's not you that is trying to manipulate us, and with us the stock market...

    You can call me paranoid...

  • now down 28.80%, and the day is still young ;)
  • No, MicroSoft releasing Windows under GPL is the true sign of the end of the world.

    --
    Don Dugger
    VA Linux Systems

  • If I'm remembering correctly it actually went like this:

    All JEDEC members were supposed to tell of any patents involving the area under discussion ahead of time which might interfere with any standards set by the group... This was not done by Rambus in that their pending patents which we are discussing now were not disclosed (even though they were only 'pending' they still should have listed them).

    On the other hand I'm betting the management/legal people within Rambus didn't even know some of their ideas had been used for some time & it's pretty shaddy that they only bother to mention this as their fledgling product RDRAM is suffering a bad introduction to the market... That is the truly shady part of the deal in my thinking...
  • Intel has made their intentions clear. They will not be using RDRAM for future chips and will likely not work with Rambus in the future. Intel's not real happy about the lawsuits and they're definately not happy about the price gouging by Rambus. It hurts Intel's business to have to rely on RDRAM. The memory is so expensive, people don't want to use the motherboards.

    Wait a minute. Where did this come from? Last I heard, Intel still loved RDRAM.

  • What about Capcom and SNK working together or Sega making Nintendo games?
    ----
  • > As [the AC to whom I'm replying] was typing this, [Electronic News] changed the byline to 3/15. They are covering their ass quite carefully.

    I can't vouch for whether or not they changed the byline while you were typing it, but the byline at "http://www.electronicnews.com/enews/news/NewsInde x.asp" for March 14 now says "Expected Rambus Ruling Could Limit Scope Of Patents"...

    It sure as hell didn't say that this morning, when I read the article and submitted the link to Slashdot.

  • Didn't you get the hand-out at the door? OK, look...

    Forces of Evil

    • Microsoft
    • Rambus
    • RIAA
    • MPAA
    • Jon Katz

    Forces of Good

    • Linus
    • RMS
    • Any Open Source development company
    • CmdrTaco

    These aren't complete lists but they're enough to help yout get by. Whenever you see a story, post "Yay! (Force of good) rocks! (Force of Evil) sucks!" and you'll do fine.

  • > The story was edited and resubmitted, after the Slashdot link was posted. The original is down the memory hole.

    Apologies to /. for posting twice in response to the same post. But if you visited the site early in the day, check your browser's cache. If you have a copy for the original article (this morning's version with the stronger by-line), you may wish to save it somewhere on your hard drive.

    IMNSHO, Electronic News should do the right thing and print a retraction of the original article.

  • Another thing that happens--or at least it has happened to me--is that a moderator will be reading along, and come across a post he/she thinks is worthy of modding up. Maybe it's only at two and should be a three or so. So she/he mods it up--but while that's happening, another moderator comes through and sees the same thing. Since neither of them have refreshed while they were reading, even if one of them mods the post up five minutes before the other, they both think they're just bumping it up to a 3--but since they both did it, it's now a four. Inadvertently over-rated.
  • Well, yes. Their RAM sucks. It's only useful in certain carefully tweaked synthetic benchmarks, and Quake 3. As far as I know, Quake 3 and video encoding are the only two things the P3 and RAMBUS are good at.

    But that's not because it's 16b. That's because it's high latency.

    Many good (ie, not Rambus) ideas involve 16b or 8b memory, a thin interface that runs very quickly should theoretically cut down latency, and provide the same throughput. (16b ram would have to run at 533Mhz to provide the bandwidth of PC133 SDRAM)

    That's not as bad as it sounds. A simpler bus is often easy to get running at higher speeds. Synchronizing 64 signals is hard. Synchronizing 8 or 16 is fairly easy.

    And then, if it takes that few traces on the motherboard, you can throw another seperate channel, or more. That would immediately double your bandwidth.

    So the thin bus isn't a bad idea, RAM might go there eventually, but we won't be using Rambus.
  • Anyone who truly understands ECC knows that DRDRAM just isn't a good fit in a server, even with Interleaved Data Mode.

    As for the Pentium IV, Intel has now garnered a definite track record for doing it wrong the first time. It started up with the crippled 486SX and it's complete CPU replacement masquerading as a 387-like FPU, the 487SX. Next up was the 5V room heater disguised as a Pentium. Then we got to the Pentium Pro, which was great for a real OS like OS/2 or Linux, but absolutely stunk on the dominant Win3 or Win95 platforms.

    Even aside from being 'Designed for DRDRAM', the Pentium IV is a rather peaky beast. On some things it absolutely flies, but on others it's slower than an older CPU half its speed. It doesn't appear well balanced.

    Look for Pentium IV.1 in another year or less. It will be better balanced, may have the SMT there's so much buzz about, and we'll see whether it's still 'Designed for DRDRAM'.

  • IMHO (Score:5)

    by Auckerman ( 223266 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:07AM (#361592)
    It seems there is a new way for a company to earn money and it comes in several forms.

    1. Go to standards commities, listen to all the sugestions, and patent them in the hope that one day the suggestions are use. (which is what RAMBUS is alleged to have done by some)

    2. Go to a standards commities and suggest your recently filed patent as a standard, in the hope someone will listen and add it to the standard. (which is what MS did with CSS)

    In order for standards to be accepted or even used for that matter, there NEEDS to be full disclosure and trust at the comitties. Meaning: No Patents Allowed. Really, the EU, The US, and other interested parties should sign a treaty that agrees on a uniform language to prevent patents from going into or out of a conference. That and the definition of "non-trival" when applied to a patent should mean more than "something a high school grad wouldn't understand". Sure, I don't understand RAM design, but there are those who KNOW what non-trivial is and it seems RAMBUS has patented a non-trivial technology.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • "RAMBUS has patented a non-trivial technology."

    Brain fart alert! I meant to type

    RAMBUS has patented a trivial technology

  • ...how the wimps who caved in to Rambus feel now. Instaed of fighting a bogus patent, several companies just gave up and agreed to pay royalties, rather than fight the Rambus greed machine.

    Heh, heh -- I hope those royalty agreements are binding, so the wimps have to pay for their wimpiness even if the Rambus patent is invalidated. It'll teach'em not to be so wussy...

    ...on the other hand (there always is one, isn't there?), if the royalty agreements are valid, it'll only encourage companies like Rambus to issue fake patents on the expectation of generating revenue from wimps.

    Damm -- I wonder how much Rambus has collected already from their patent skullduggery?


    --
    Scott Robert Ladd
    Master of Complexity
    Destroyer of Order and Chaos

  • On a related matter Crime-Fraud [theregister.co.uk] allegations have been included, in consideration of Rambus JEDEC participation. The question of Who knew What, When and Why they didn't disclose their patent applications while the body was working on an Open SDRAM standard.

    And of course, The Register's take on the SDRAM/DDR SDRAM [theregister.co.uk].

    Assuming this whole thing blows up in Rambus' face, this would end the SDRAM subsidy of RDRAM, which you can expect to see suffer an awful fate. Makes you wonder what Intel is thinking at this moment, with it's finger stuck in the door jamb.

    --

  • > No "limiting of scope" and no invalidation of any part of the patent, just a Judge being safe and agreeing with an "expert" that RAMBUS has no patent on SDRAM.

    FWIW, I leeched the headline pretty much verbatim from the Electronic News article. (IANAL, and the Electronic News article may have overstated the case, and I may have propagated the overstatement)

    Your phrasing - "most likely" their DDR/SDRAM claims will not apply - is probably the more fair take on the story.

  • Too bad the whole thing is bogus... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:47AM (#361600)
    http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?T=marketsquot e99_news.ht&s=AOrD1LBRvUmFtYnVz It's already been confirmed (even by infineon's lawyers) that there's been ABSOLUTELY no ruling and that the EBN article is false. This is just more emulex-ish crappola to drive Rambus down. Hasn't anyone noticed that Micron is one of EBN's partners? They'll do anything to knock rambus down. There are no "good guys" in this business. You idiots who consider the anti-rambus companies the "good guys" are seriously misguided. They're all in this for your money. Stop making holy wars out of monetary battles.
  • There is no competition.

    I have 512MB of PC133. It cost me $216 Cdn.

    512MB of RDRAM costs ~$1300 Cdn. Maybe more, maybe less. The point is, it's way, way more expensive.

    The price/performance ratio does not justify the cost. Now, if rdram was sold at loss-leader prices in order to gain marketshare, then maybe I would've considered using it, but that's not in the best itnerests of the RAM makers, so it won't happen.

    Therefore, RDRAM is dead. It's window of opportunity is closed. Hence their last gasp stream of litigations. IMHO, which will likely end in criminal investigations against Rambus over their lack of full disclosure when participating in the JEDEC conference... or something to that effect.

    Whatever... so long as they go down in a flaming heap.

    -- kwashiorkor --
    Leaps in Logic
    should not be confused with

  • Re:Hitachi signs agreement? (Score:3)

    by Tackhead ( 54550 ) on Thursday March 15, 2001 @08:52AM (#361602)
    > Am I missing something here? Why did Hitachi sign licensing agreements with RAMBUS?

    Hyundai is presently in rather dire financial straits due to a high debt load. Hyundai may just have been hedging their bets, as they may not be in a position to afford the cost of losing the case against Rambus.

    It's also possible that since RDRAM is more expensive than SDRAM or DDR, and we all know how low RAM prices have gotten lately, Hyundai may have decided there's no money to be made in anything other than RDRAM. (And that there's therefore no money to be saved by trying to cut Rambus out of their SDRAM and DDR sales, since they may not be making money on these types of RAM anyways)

  • What does the former East Germany have to do with RAM?

    Nothing to my knowledge, but I can see how you'd think that (Deutsch Democratic(sic) Republic). This is what all that alphabet soup really means:

    • RAM: Random Access Memory
    • DRAM: Dynamic RAM (information contained in one capacitor as opposed to several transistors, but each row of the memory matrix must be refreshed a couple hundred times a second)
    • EDO: Extended Data Out (accesses are pipelined to an extent; one can start as another is finishing)
    • SDRAM: Synchronous DRAM (uses a clocked protocol to expand on EDO)
    • DDR: Double Data Rate (the internal bus is twice as wide, and the external bus is multiplexed so as to send a word both on the rising and falling edge of the clock)
    • DRDRAM: Direct Rambus® DRAM. According to this Hardware Central report [hardwarecentral.com], "Its goal is to get rid of the latency." I don't think it has achieved that goal in the slightest.

    I hope this clarifies what "DDR" means. Of course, I could be talking out of my proverbial ass.


    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.
  • No it isn't. Rambus were trying to apply their patent to SDRAM and DDR RAM. This article shows that the patent is effectively invalid against these technologies.
    Rambus were a little irritated that their technology wasn't being used (cos it sucked but that's not the point), so they decided hmm, let's try and hit everyone who makes memory. So hopefully this case will show that SDRAM and DDR RAM manufacturers don't need to pay royalties to Rambus (which is almost exclusively their form of income these days unless people decide to go and buy the P4...)
    --
    Andrew

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