Month: February 2008

MetaRAM Busts RAMBUS Stranglehold?

Sand Hill Road envies RAMBUS. Oh, they don’t envy them their lawsuits, precarious business model or turbulent management structure. But they do envy them their ruthless monopoly of the high-speed DRAM market. RAMBUS successfully competed against the behemoths with a clever architectural enhancement, kept belief in their approach against huge odds, fought back as hard and dirty as the big boys and made licensing deals stick. They are survivors.

When RAMBUS went IPO back in 1997, I was completing work on the first preliminary patent application for InterProphet’s SiliconTCP technology, while William began his hunt for investment. RAMBUS’s IPO was on the minds of many VCs, but it wasn’t in a good way, surprisingly. RAMBUS’s 7 prior years had been fraught with changes in business model and personnel. Instead of setting up a fab, RAMBUS chose to license their technology. Finally, RAMBUS chose to make their stand on the basis of their patents. Don’t let me fool you — investors may crab about the need for “intellectual property protection” but when it comes to playing with the big boys, they believe about as much in IPR as the tooth fairy.

RAMBUS has been remarkably successful in defending and enhancing their patents (and yes, I know about their “steering committee” games — coming from the OS side I’ve seen Microsoft and others play the same games, even to the point of doing software patents on work pre-existing by decades). Essentially, they’ve played dirty like Intel, Hynix and all the other guys the VCs said you could never win against. But it has been a very long wild and crazy ride for the payoff — too much for the “10x in 3 years” crowd.

But despite all of RAMBUS’s remarkable turbulence, it has been amazingly successful. During one incredible record-setting day in 1998, I listened to a top-tier VC say that he’d never want a single share of RAMBUS’s stock no matter *how* much money they made. He just hated them. Another top-tier VC rambled on about how “you could make a lot of money with a RAMBUS business model, but they weren’t interested in that”. What they really hated is how there wasn’t a single massive success where they could bow and take their winnings (like VMWARE in 2006 for example, but they didn’t invest in that one either because it was run by a husband-wife team that believed open source was valuable — hmm, beginning to see a pattern). As Magdelena Yesil (at the time partner at USVP) liked to intone to me “Venture Capitalists are more capitalist than venture these days”. Chip risk wasn’t as exciting when you could respin any company as an Internet venture and go public with no revenue. And semiconductor companies *are* risky.

Semiconductor companies are also the historical lifeblood of Silicon Valley — hey, that’s why it’s called “Silicon Valley” and not “Internet Valley”! So now we come to MetaRAM, an attempt to steal RAMBUS’s monopoly on architecture. According to Ryan Block of Engadget “MetaRam uses a specialized “MetaSDRAM” chipset that effectively bonds and addresses four cheap 1Gb DRAM chips as one, tricking any machine’s memory controller into using it as a 4x capacity DIMM.”

Is the technology innovative? Not likely — it sounds like a combination cache and bank decoder, which is not innovative in the least. In fact, you need 4x the number of components on the DIMM, which means 4x the number of current spikes and decoupling capacitors, even if you put the chips together in the same package. Because you have a fifth chip, you complicate things even more. There is no way you can approach the triple-zero (volume, power, cost) sacred to chip designers with such a design, because one single high-speed high-capacity chip will eventually win out given the proliferation of small expensive gadgets demanding the lowest of volume and power. In a world of gadgets like IPODs, cellphones, laptops, PDAs and the like, cost is very important but *not* the most important quantity. So RAMBUS doesn’t have a lot to worry about here.

Hynix has been fighting a losing battle against RAMBUS ever since getting hit with a whopping $306M patent infringement judgment in 2006 (since reduced to $133M), and RAMBUS is still going for more. These are the same guys who pleaded guilty in 2005 to a DOJ memory price-fixing scheme from 1999-2002 and paid a $185M fine. There is no love lost in the memory biz.

So where does little MetaRAM come in. When technology fails, maybe a clever business model will do. MetaRAM’s big claim to fame is cost reduction — not for gadgets or laptops, but according to Fred Weber, CEO of MetaRAM, for “personal supercomputers” and “large databases”. And who is the big licensee for this so-called technology. Why, it’s Hynix of course, who announced they will make this lumbering memory module. They claim it will be lower power. I think I’d like an independent evaluation on this point, but it will probably be lower cost. Is it worth it? Given reliability considerations, that also remains to be seen. But the moral of this saga is simple — human memories are longer than memory architectures in this business, and the real puppet-master behind the throne (Kleiner-Perkins) is sure to walk away with the money. I wish I could say the same for the customers.

Fun Friday – Jim Gray Tribute Scheduled

Jim Gray was lost at sea a year ago, but he is not forgotten. His family has joined with UC Berkeley, the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society to hold a day of technical sessions in his memory on Saturday, May 31, 2008 in Zellerbach Hall at UC Berkeley.

Jim was a Turing emeritus and computer science legend. There will be speakers discussing his contributions to fault tolerance and database transaction processing from notable companies like IBM, Tandem and DEC, as well as his later interests at Microsoft Research in handling massive processing and storage for astronomical and high energy physics datasets. This promises to be a fitting farewell to a man of dedication and intellect.

SCO Gets Valentine, Lessig Campaigns for “Change”

Well, SCO got a big Valentine’s treat last week – a $100M potential investment by the very politically-connected Stephen Norris Capital Partners (an equity firm) and their “partners from the Middle East” to lift the firm out of the morass of Chapter 11 bankruptcy and into private hands. While Linux adherents are clearly annoyed with SCO’s escape from the bankruptcy abyss, the more interesting item to consider is how SNCP is going to get the kind of “bragging rights” IRR out of UNIX.

What if there was a strategic need for an OS that’s entirely licensed for military use? $100M would be a reasonable bet to get return on investment if 1) you had an “in” with the DOD and 2) they buy off that they need an OS qualified for strategic security reasons. I know some people might get hung up on the Middle East connection, but that would only be an issue if there was majority foreign ownership, and that can be easily handled via a domestic equity firm. Just food for thought.

Also, Larry Lessig of “creative commons” fame (whom I’ve interviewed as well as reviewed) has announced that he is considering a run for Tom Lanto’s seat against the very popular and (once again) politically-connected Jackie Speier. Larry’s concern is political corruption, and given the Zeitgeist it is a serious one, but not one that has arisen recently. Several years ago Larry and I chatted about the possibility (before YouTube, mind you) of using user-generated video to create a “truth squad” to monitor political campaigns for honesty. We both could see this coming, but I think it came into fruition with the “macaca” remark blurted out by George Allen (former Republican Senator for Virginia) during a campaign stop and captured on video for the world by the intrepid (and unflappable) S. R. Sidarth. I don’t vote in this district, but I must say that Larry would make this a very interesting race if he chooses to enter it. Time will tell.

What are they saying about you, girl?

Stanley Fish of the NYTimes today explored the “hate Hillary” movement, something that he said he was reluctant to do “because of a fear that it would advance the agenda that is its target”, in other words, embolden Hillary haters into sending him more trash email of the type where “the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry was a model of objectivity” in comparison. He was not arguing with people who genuinely prefer other candidates on the issues. Instead he was examining those for whom “the level of personal vituperation unconnected to, and often unconcerned with, the facts” has become an all-consuming hatred that he felt was akin to that vehemence expressed by anti-Semites.

What I found interesting was a thoughtful comment from “J” (number 176):

Thank you for this piece. As a woman working an a male dominant field, I’d like to think I am equal to my fellow co-workers and am a welcomed member. But with the development of this campaign you can not imagine the vitriol I hear in my office. In my professional office I hear men talk about the size of her thighs, how grotesque they find her, stating that they would never “allow” their wives to wear pantsuits, that a woman will never make a good president and continually pick her apart physically. This is in loud voices as though I am expected to join in, not a private conversation by any means. It often makes me wonder what they think of me in this office and what would be the effects of my being promoted.

“J’s” note reminded me of something a very wise older male African-American executive once told me in assessing your standing and value to a company. He said that it was very important to listen to your co-workers when they talked about others without managers present. If it was disrespectful and unfair, than he said that’s exactly how they talk about you behind your back. If they spoke about others with respect and fairness, then that’s how you were spoken of.

So “J” is right in her concern about how she is perceived of and spoken of when she’s not around, because this vulgar conversation could indicate she’s not considered part of the team. If she were, then her co-workers would be much more aware of how a fellow member of the team feels about their vulgarity (and believe me, a lot of men loathe this kind of stuff too). Professional men and women are quite capable of self-control if they believe it is demanded by the team to get the job done.

Silicon Valley attracts the best and brightest in innovation of all religions, creeds and colors. The thing that unites us is our dedication to the creation of new technologies, products and businesses — workstations, operating systems, networking, enterprise software, and Internet. The key to success with such a diverse workforce is building the team to accomplish the mission. “Outing” members of the team imperils their ability to do the job and diverts resources when focus is needed to survive in a “world is flat” global economy.

So what would be the best advice for “J”? The direct way (and the best to clear the air and refocus the team) is to find the manager and point out that the team isn’t focused on building the product but instead involved in indulging individual whims. I wish I could say it will work — there are a lot of bad managers out there who don’t get held accountable when their teams fail to achieve — but sometimes sanity prevails.

But what if “J” fails to get satisfaction? In this case, she’d have to do what a lot of women are forced to do — try to find another job and pray she isn’t “too old” (for women I’m told it’s now 40, for men I’m told it’s 50, and yes it’s discriminatory but as an SV attorney said not so long ago “You can’t prove intent”). “J” can’t ignore that a lot of men (and women) agreed with Rush Limbaugh when he said nobody would want to watch a woman, no matter how smart or experienced or good at her job, grow old.

Would be safer for “J” to keep her mouth shut, hunker down and try to last a few years longer? Perhaps. In a recession, taking a risk like this, even if it’s right and good, may require “J” to pay too high a price. It isn’t fair, but what if nobody is either?

I can’t see a good answer here. Is there one?