Rambus sued the memory manufacturers for royalties on DDR technology, that has nothing to do with memory manufacturer’s price fixing. Their participation in JEDEC, and the perception that they used that membership to unethically gain patents was the reference behaviour of my article. Had they been successful, they would be collecting royalties from every memory manufacturer on the planet. That is what the technology news sites focused on and therefore drew the ire of their readership. And their failure at the time to gain control of these broad patent rights did cause many to breath a sigh of relief.

Rambus has some excellent technology, but it was poorly matched with the P4 netburst architecture. It performed much better on platforms that were more bandwidth sensitive vs latency sensitive. If Rambus were able to market there memory technology to work with processors that have integrated memory controllers, it’s advantages would have shown. The negative performance reviews on consumer platforms only sealed it’s fate given it’s higher price at the time, regardless of whether or not the reasons for that higher price was ethical.

Time will make a lot of people forget Rambus’s previous failure to establish RDRAM in the consumer PC market and all the bad press that circled from that. However it is performing well for the Sony PS3, and making it’s product a commodity item could serve it well in consumer market.

“Anybody familiar with Rambus knows that they ultimately failed in their quest to essentially own the IP surrounding the random access memory (RAM) market”

How about doing some extra research on your rmbs story? Try the rmbs forum at

http://www.investorvillage.com or here at Business Week:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2006/tc20060601_714385.htm

PS – I am long rmbs.