Rambus profits, revenue up

Rambus posted profits of million on revenue of .4 million for its first quarter of fiscal 1999, yesterday. But while those figures represent growth of 25 per cent and 13 per cent, respectively, the company warned that it expects its earnings to remain static over the next two or three quarters. The company blamed a season fall in demand for Rambus products for the Nintendo N64, the discontinuation of a controller development by Cirrus Logic and Chromatic Research (now part of ATI), and extra costs engendered as Rambus expands its marketing programme designed to promote its Direct Rambus DRAM technology as a standard. Direct Rambus DRAM is, in any case, unlikely to take off before the middle of 1999, when Intel releases its Camino chip-set, the first mainstream motherboard to take advantage of the technology, which Intel is priming as the successor to SDRAM (Direct DRAM is roughly twice as fast as current SDRAM, with a peak speed of 1/.6GBps). Cyrix, AMD and Compaq are taking a similar line, and this level of support has persuaded most other major manufacturers to follow the Rambus flag too. ®

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