Rambus Inc. in briefings this week showed projections of a 12% Direct RDRAM share of the total DRAM market by 2005 -- a far cry from the 50-to-75% share that supporters had forecast in recent years.
In presentations to the Platform Conference in San Jose, Calif. and elsewhere, Rambus affirmed forecasts by IDC that also showed rival DDR memory taking nearly 80% total DRAM market share in the same time period.
Frank Fox, vice president and general manager of the RDRAM Solutions Division, said Rambus was pleased with the projections that showed Direct Rambus growing over the three years and capturing a larger share of the high performance desktop and workstation market.
The Rambus-sanctioned forecast, however, was at wide variance with previous projections by Mark Edelstone, analyst with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, who several years ago was claiming RDRAM would take over 75% of the PC market by 2003. Samsung Electronics last year predicted that more than 600 million RDRAM chips would be shipped this year.
Fox said, however, that Rambus Inc. never makes any forecasts of future RDRAM market share, leaving that to other parties. He said the firm was delighted to see the growing penetration of RDRAMs into the high performance space, where it was proving much more cost effective than rival memory technologies.
He cited seven standard benchmark tests, from BizWinstone 2001 to several different ViewPerf tests, that showed 128-Megabit RDRAM achieved up to 40% greater performance than 128-Mbit DDR.
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