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Spansion to pay royalty fees to Rambus for certain memory technologies

Rambus announced last week that it has won another major license agreement deal with a company called Spansion. In the cross-licensing agreement which will last for five years, Spansion is entitled to a number of Rambus patents that focuses on high-speed memory interfaces and memory designs. The agreement will be royalty base -- like most other Rambus license grants -- and will give Spansion an edge in flash memory design.

Spansion focuses its products on the mobile, automotive and networking markets, where demand for high-performance memory is high. The company was jointly created by AMD and Fujitsu several years ago and today is one of the world's largest producers of flash memory -- a market that AMD very much prides itself in.

"This license agreement with Rambus enables Spansion to expand our memory solutions for cellular phone applications," said Robert Melendres, executive vice president and chief legal officer at Spansion. "Working with the Rambus team to secure access to their patent portfolio will provide us more design freedom as we develop next generation Flash memory technology and solutions."

Spansion is one of many companies that are currently part of licensing agreements with Rambus. AMD, Elpida, Fujitsu, Qimonda, Matsushita, NEC, Renesas and Toshiba are just some of the companies out there utilizing Rambus' technology.

Rambus holds an iron fist over its patents and products its intellectual property with legendary ferocity.  DailyTech has reported on numerous ocassions about Rambus and its exercises in the court room. Rambus recently won a case against Hynix for patent infringement but Hynix isn't the only one. Micron was also recently entangled in court with Rambus over a staggering 18 patent infringement claims.

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hurray
By GhandiInstinct on 1/15/07, Rating: 0
RE: hurray
By The Sword 88 on 1/15/2007 8:11:50 PM , Rating: 3
You'll skip DDR memory?

Why?


RE: hurray
By GhandiInstinct on 1/15/2007 8:22:58 PM , Rating: 2
Latency isn't up to par, bandwidth isn't up to par, I'm a high end user and I don't buy new computer hardware monthly, I buy it generationally, I still use RD800 :)


RE: hurray
By StevoLincolnite on 1/15/2007 8:42:42 PM , Rating: 4
Everytime I hear Rambus... I think of the horrific launch of the Pentium 4.
Rambus is Over priced.
Remember how you used to pay through the nose just for a 64Mb stick? Then Intel started Bundling some ram with the processors? And some companies did the same with the motherboards? Rambus was a flop. Lets see if they can make something out of it.
And if your still sticking with RD800 ram, Which means your still using an early Pentium 4, Which means the 1.4Ghz Pentium 3 Tualatin With SD Ram would better your machine.


RE: hurray
By Axbattler on 1/15/2007 11:04:24 PM , Rating: 2
Not to mention the lawsuits. That bugged me even more than the performance.


RE: hurray
By ecktt on 1/16/2007 1:23:57 AM , Rating: 2
Rambus was ahead of their time back in the P3/P4/Athlon era providing more memory bandwidth than (at the time) FSB could consume and so DDR lower latency was a better match. Their memory back then and now simplifies motherboard design and beats the pants off DDR/2/3/n bandwidth. Latency was high but has improved. I’ll not argue the pros and cons of DDR vs Rambus memory but its undeniable that as DDR is and its successors are getting worse with respect to latency. God alone know why Intel went with FBDIMM instead of XDR. No I am not a RAMBUS fan boy and no I don’t own stock in RAMBUS. I just don’t like to see good technology shot down with ignorance.


RE: hurray
By hubajube on 1/16/2007 2:22:11 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
I just don’t like to see good technology shot down with ignorance.
I guess high prices and non-existent performance are not ignorant?


RE: hurray
By StevoLincolnite on 1/16/2007 6:22:41 PM , Rating: 2
*COUGHS* Bullshit!
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1245&p=16
SD Ram PWNS Rambus on the Pentium 3, More than likely because of latency.
And it matched the FSB.

And http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1541&p=10

"Rambus was ahead of their time back in the P3/P4/Athlon era providing more memory bandwidth than (at the time) FSB could consume and so DDR lower latency was a better match."

And then they eventually released Dual Channel DDR to keep up, And then Bang! DDR2!

Also read this: http://pcworld.about.com/news/Sep102001id61244.htm

It shows that even on the Pentium 4 using crappy SD Ram on the system, proved that SD was only slightly slower than RDAM yet Rambus was 3-4 times more expensive.

So I wouldn't call it good technology, SD and DDR were always the better choice in all situations. Price/Performance ratio SD PWNED Rambus. And theres a huge difference in age and bandwidth of both technology's. (And cost!)


RE: hurray
By Gatt on 1/15/2007 10:16:29 PM , Rating: 4
You've gotta be kidding me.

You do realize that RD800 chip has worse latency than the worst DDR modules manufactured right? Latency so bad that even the earliest DDR modules can outperform it, despite being clocked hundreds of megahertz lower.

You also realize that XDR would be prohibitively expensive to use, just as RIMM's were.

Nothing made by Rambus is worth buying, I wish they'd gone under following the RIMM disaster.


RE: hurray
By Acanthus on 1/16/07, Rating: 0
RE: hurray
By Magnus Dredd on 1/16/2007 5:34:09 PM , Rating: 2
Perhaps, he doesn't... But I do.

Rambus was really only seriously useful in the very high end where the horribly high latency was less of an issue than a very high bandwidth stream of data. This is useful especially in database applications where a stored proceedure may be able to fit into the L2 or L3 cache of the CPU and latency hits from swapping into and out of the L2/L3 cache aren't performance killers. Instead in this niche market (which also includes scientific computing, and video rendering), you use small amounts of instruction and need to stream the data at the CPU as fast as possible. For this to work the CPU has to have a fair amount of cache memory, like most server processors have.

Their only real major innovation was that their interface was serialized in a similar fashion to PCIe. This means that increased bandwith is simply a matter of adding channels (like PCIe). The problem with this is that when you have 4 channels, you have to add 4 sticks at a time, or 2 dual channel sticks. In the server space this is no big deal. You pack a box with 16 dual channel slots and add 4 sticks at a time at a high cost, but massive throughput. The enterprise has machines physically big enough, and they have enough money to shoulder the massive expense. The problem this led to was that the more sticks per channel you install, the worse your latency gets.

So for the server space they had some interesting ideas. For many (perhaps most) generic server tasks (non-static web serving, multiple service machines, etc) the amount of cache is simply not enough to offset the latency issues with instruction swapping and data dependencies. For home use and gaming, Rambus was a poor match. ESPECIALLY couple with the pentium 4 which had such amazing penalties to branch mispredicts due to the length of the pipeline. Rambus made this weakness in the P4 so much worse.

If you would like, I can pull some numbers showing how terribly latent Rambus was. BTW, DDR2 is available with fairly low latencies, far lower than Rambus has ever offered. 4-4-4-12
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...

oh, heres some Rambus... Latency is 40ns!!!!!!!!!! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...


RE: hurray
By Magnus Dredd on 1/17/2007 12:54:07 PM , Rating: 2
I'd recommend reading the processor related articles in the Ars Technica paedia:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia.ars

John Stokes also recently released a book "Inside the Machine"
http://nostarch.com/insidemachine.htm
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Machine-Introduction-...


RE: hurray
By semo on 1/15/2007 8:23:20 PM , Rating: 4
you'll skip personal computing altogether?

why?


RE: hurray
By Atrye on 1/15/07, Rating: -1
hmm
By DeepBlue1975 on 1/16/2007 7:41:00 AM , Rating: 1
Looks as if there always is someone out there willing to pay for feeding a monster like Rambus :D

RDR had interesting technological sides to it, specially by the time it came out... It smartly tried to address the problem of massive parallel communications to and from system memory... The results were less than brilliant, though, and not even the bandwidth hungry netburst cores did benefit too much by using RDR over DDR, and, for the worse, RIMMs were so much more expensive than DIMMs and the latency found on the seen implementations was so much worse that it negated any benefit that the extra bandwidth could give.
Maybe if CPU architectures from that time had a much bigger cache, they could have benefitted much more from something like RDR




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