[rescue] Good source for Rambus?

[Dave McGuire]

On Apr 1, 2004, at 4:05 PM, Francois Dion wrote:
> Obviously my emails seems to have rubbed you the wrong way and I'm not 
> sure why.

   First, the insinuation that the stuff I'm running in my computer room 
is "old abandoned crap" irritated me to no end.  This is my hobby, yes, 
but it is also how I make my living...and that very stuff (well, this 
particular stuff's predecessors) in my house has developed quite a few 
products, as well as created jobs for a few hundred people, some of 
whom you may even know...some of whom at least used to be on this very 
list.

   While I'm not exactly stuffing my mattress with cash these days, that 
hasn't always been the case.  I have exactly the equipment that I want, 
what I perceive to be the very best that money can buy (with only one 
or two exceptions), and I'm quite proud of it, thank you.

>  I have a great deal of respect for you and I hope you dont 
> misunderstand my comments. I'm not poking fun at you. Just trying to 
> figure out why it's always the type of memory I need that is the most 
> expensive... Murphy's law at work.

   You got stuck behind the RAMBUS 8-ball, like quite a few other 
people.  It was just bad luck.  Buying RAMBUS-based systems seemed like 
a good idea at the time, but that can be said of a great many things.  
Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. :-(

   You should either bite the bullet and buy the overpriced memory, or 
cut your losses and replace those motherboards now...and buy cheaper 
memory to populate them with.  Either will involve more cash outlay 
than you'd likely planned on, however, but I don't see that you really 
have any other options if you really need the additional memory.

> I was surprised that if truely Rambus has been abandonned by everybody 
> and perceived to be such a bad technology, prices should tank, since 
> there are a lot of them out there already manufactured and not too 
> many people to buy them, possibly. Well that was the theory. There has 
> to be a lot more motherboards out there than I tought and more people 
> upgrading.

   There aren't *that* many of them.

> Maybe I'm just being too much of a scrooge, but I tought that $100 for 
> 256MB was a bit high. I did eventually find $86 + shipping, which is 
> still close to $100. That's $200 for 512MB. In 2004. The same I paid 3 
> years ago.

   You are absolutely correct.  The prices are still high because RAMBUS 
memory isn't being produced in very high volumes, because very few 
systems use it.  If the production volumes increase, the prices will go 
down, but since it's generally considered a "dead-end" memory 
interface, that isn't likely to happen.

          -Dave

--
Dave McGuire          "PC users only know two 'solutions'...
Cape Coral, FL          reboot and upgrade."    -Jonathan Patschke