As is known (see our January news archive), Samsung is currently manufacturing around 7 million "128Mbit-equivalent" RDRAM chips per month and cannot satisfy Intel’s growing demand, which makes around 10 million of chips like that per month. Also we have already told you that by the end of the year Samsung is planning to increase the volumes of manufactured RDRAM memory chips up to 20 million "128Mbit equivalent" chips per month. However, Intel is now in such a situation when waiting is unacceptable that’s why the company decided to grant Samsung a kind of sponsorship, according to a post at SiliconStrategies. They signed an agreement to fund additional production capacity for 128-megabit Rambus DRAMs, i.e. provided some financing, which could help Samsung speed up the manufacturing growth: from the current 7 million to the required 10 million chips per month.
Well, Samsung seems to be really lucky almost everywhere. The company not only receives huge revenues from the memory chips manufacturing, but also won’t have to pay a penny for the increase in production capacity.
Samsung promises that they will be ramping production of 128Mbit Rambus chips in March. They also expect market demand for Rambus DRAMs to reach 300 million chips in 2001, with 250 million being used in Pentium 4-based PCs and workstations. About 50 million RDRAMs will be used in high-performance game products this year. Moreover, Samsung predicts that by 2002, the market demand will double to 600 million. We don’t know how, but it is Samsung that should care about it. All other memory manufacturers and analysts expect RDRAM sales to drop down significantly in 2002.