rambus has struck again. Expect predatory rambus patent lawsuits to raise DRAM memory prices 1 or 2$, the royalty they’re forcing companies to pay. They won a $306 million lawsuit against Hynix. (see TR news item) This will hurt the industry in general, only helping their investors. (including Intel, who’s laying off people anyway)
This company skunked the IEEE by patenting DRAM designs proposed for the standard, and now DDRAM is popular as lower cost alternative to their own RAMBUS memory which is slower (serial) – see performance reviews at tomshardware.com
I believe in IP but in this case they did something slimy here. Good luck to the rest of us who will pay for their greed and shady dealings.
Note: I may have been too hasty. I don’t know. From what I heard, they did not say they had a patent to the IEEE standards committee (which they were on). their overpriced and overhyped rambus serial memory is a separate issue from whether they had a valid patent that was stolen.
See tomshardware.com about the hyping of their memory, which tended to perform the same as ddram, and costs way more. I guess this had left a bad taste in my mouth but is not illegal to sell expensive, badly performing memory. Caveat emptor.
some other discussions:
https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=8&threadID=194015&messageID=2002141
https://www.techrepublic.com.com/5208-11183-0.html?forumID=5&threadID=194026&start=0
