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  • Marlin1975 - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    Let me guess, they have a patent that covers it?

    F__K rambus.
  • mikeztm - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    Obviously they don't have a patent that covers it.
    They have a ton of patents that cover this thing and cross link to all other patents they own .
    Once you licensed something from them you are totally screwed.
  • patssle - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    Maybe they can create RD-GDDR6 ram....pair it with an Intel i9-XXX-EE (Emergency Edition) processor...price it 5x the fastest AMD processor...and be able to claim fastest processor on the market.

    And we can party like it's 2004!
  • Foeketijn - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    And at the same time, we should have an upvote button.
  • mrvco - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    I'm glad that the douchery of Rambus has not been forgotten.
  • close - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link

    It can't be forgotten by anyone who 20 years ago knew what RAM is. Or someone who had to pay for a CRIMM (for anyone who doesn't know, it's a dummy DIMM, similar to a SCSI terminator, that was needed to complete the pairs in the empty slots).
  • Yojimbo - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    Of course they have a patent that covers it. Don't you expect to be paid for your work? If you don't want to use their patents then buy someone else's PHYs. When ARM comes out and says they've developed a new GPU do you say "let me guess, they have a patent that covers it? F___K ARM." ??
  • IntelUser2000 - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    Rambus. Aren't they known by most as holding patents just to sue others?

    Not even Intel could deal with them. They were making Timna, a value-oriented CPU that uses RDRAM. Obviously using the expensive Pentium 4 to spread RDRAM was going to take too long and they had to make it cheaper somehow.

    Timna still got killed because they couldn't justify the cost of RDRAM no matter how low they priced the CPU. RDRAM limped along a little longer in the early Northwood generation until it got dumped completely in 2003.
  • Yojimbo - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    They may be known for that but only among people who have no idea what they are talking about. The patents that Rambus tried to sue people with were patents that they had developed themselves. The issue was an impropriety with the way they got those patents introduced into the memory standards.

    Regarding Intel, again, that is a mischaracterization of the situation. Intel did deal with Rambus. The people Intel couldn't deal with were the memory manufacturers. The memory manufacturers didn't like being told what to produce and they didn't like the idea that a proprietary memory product could become mainstream. RDRAM remained very expensive because memory manufacturers resisted the production of the memory. Incidentally, the resistance quite possibly was some form of an agreed upon concerted act by the memory manufacturers, which I am guessing would be illegal.

    You know, it doesn't really matter to Rambus what consumers think of them because they don't sell any products to consumers. They sell to manufacturers and those manufacturers obviously are in position to know better. But it's just annoying to have to read the same false stuff every time the name Rambus is written.
  • bigboxes - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link

    Eff Rambus.
  • Samus - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    Damn, and to think 20 years ago most videocards and memory buses got like 1GB/s
  • Lesliestandifer - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link

    Yea I can’t imagine what they would use it for maybe deep learning or AI but ram bus bandwidth doesn’t help pc gaming. If it helped either I would think something like a Radeon VII and it’s 1TB/s HBM would be better suited.
  • Spladam - Tuesday, May 17, 2022 - link

    And here we are in 2022 and AMD is refreshing their entire current lineup with 18Gbs GDDR 6.
  • PeachNCream - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    Rambus, now there's a name that brings back lots of negative memories. I doubt that much of the company's old leadership is still in place. Perhaps things have changed and the company is doing meaningful work nowadays. I'm willing to hold off on making judgements about the company and see if more interesting things are coming.
  • Slash3 - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link

    Oh, sweet summer child...
  • Yojimbo - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    It's funny (scary, actually) what people remember and don't remember and how passionate they can be about things they really don't understand. It shows what the power of the media can really be. One looks at cases like Rambus and one can see why ideologues fight so hard to publicly demonize and frame people in the media. It often doesn't take much, either. Everybody "knows" Ty Cobb was a racist, etc.

    Regarding Rambus, they aggressively tried to get everybody attached to their IP 20 years ago. They were never a "patent troll" company. They developed their own IP, and still do. They are sort of like ARM or Interdigital or lots of other companies that develop IP that solve problems for an industry with the intention of licensing their solutions. Companies like that do their own research and do real work to solve real problems. ARM has their own ecosystem, unlike Rambus (although Rambus did develop a proprietary memory RDRAM that Intel chose for their Pentium 4 chips because they needed something with high clock rates. But the memory manufacturers tried to resist that memory and in the end the Pentium 4 was a failure (its design philosophy was a failure, rather) owing to a shift in the physics of semiconductor manufacturing at smaller scales.) A company like Rambus or Interdigital, however, tends to work with the industry standards bodies. 20+ years ago Rambus was very aggressive, though, and was accused of hiding the fact that they already held patents on things they proposed to be put into the standards, or something along those lines.

    None of the current board of directors of Rambus were directors when the lawsuits were filed, and from what I see, only 2 were even directors when the lawsuits were even going on (which dragged out for years after filing, as those things do). The corporate leadership (CEO, etc) are entirely different.

    In contrast, no one seems to remember that at the same time as this Rambus stuff was going on (20 years ago), Samsung and Hynix were found guilty of price fixing by both the US and the EU regulators.
  • Yojimbo - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link

    I write this because I am just sick of seeing the same stupid shit from 20 years ago every time the name "Rambus" is mentioned.
  • Lord of the Bored - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link

    You're conveniently forgetting the part where they were filing addendums to their patents to add things that were discussed by JEDEC. Adding them to patents that hadn't covered them before.

    They were patenting other people's inventions by stapling the work of others on to their own patents. It was transparent patent-troll behavior. By most counts I've seen, they still do so today, just slightly less transparently.

    I haven't forgotten DRAM price-fixing. It hasn't escaped my attention that it still goes on today, either.
  • Yojimbo - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link

    If that is something that really happened, me forgetting it really is convenient because it's as irrelevant as everything else. I don't think people understand was a corporation is. What if they had changed their name to Intercom and then the entire ownership and leadership structure changed? What it be OK to forget it then? What if they were bought out by somebody who took on the name Rambus but the original Rambus unit was spun off and renamed as Abracadabra? What shouldwe remember now? The alien concept we have created which is the corporation does not fit naturally with our tribe and clan based brains. By not recognizing that we make ourselves open to exploitation by the corporations who can take advantage of our misperceptions in clever ways.

    But as for you saying that Rambus is currently "stapling the work of other to their own patents" in some way that isn't an industry standard way of acting, please point us to where they are doing that. That seems a lot more useful and important than arguing about something from 20 years ago. You say it is "by most counts you've seen" so it should be rather easy for you to give us some details.

    PS, I am not sure why you think DRAM price-fixing is going on today.
  • xenol - Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - link

    As much as I want to believe you, I'd have to issue a [citation needed]

    Sure, it goes the other way too, but a claim like this warrants something other than a commenter's word.
  • eastcoast_pete - Saturday, November 2, 2019 - link

    How about the latency of that "fastest GDDR6"? If they reduced that, it might see more non-graphics use.
    One of the reasons why GDDR memory isn't typically used as system RAM even in systems where build costs are secondary is that graphics memory typically has a lot more latency than DDR4, DDR3, etc. I always wondered how that longer latency affects consoles like the XBox OneX and the PS4 Pro, which use GDDR also to feed the CPU part.
  • drexnx - Sunday, November 3, 2019 - link

    hasn't 16gbps GDDR6 been out for a while now? the 2080 Super ships with it downclocked to 15.5gbps from the factory
  • Great_Scott - Monday, November 4, 2019 - link

    I'm not really excited by (G)DDR6. Yay more bandwidth.

    Bummer that latency, which is really important, manages to stay about the same regardless of the memory technology employed. I don't recall the exact article (it was probably AT) that found that the latency numbers worked out to be roughly equal regardless of memory standard.

    IIRC it was a DDR3/DDR4 comparison article that focused on the numbers as CAS went up over time.
  • WaltC - Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - link

    I'll never forget the RDRAM/JEDEC debacle. No Rambus for me, sorry--likely they've stolen it somewhere and then patented it, and then they'll sue the OEM who invented it just to put icing on their corroded cake...;) Ugh. Patents should be like trademarks--you don't use 'em in a product you manufacture--you lose 'em. Patent trolls should all be deported to back alleys in Tijuana--near the dog-fighting pits, preferably.

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