Really, why not? It is almost undoubted already that Rambus will lose the case against Infineon, and then all other similar cases against other memory manufacturers. After that the value of the company (together with all its shares) will drop down almost to the minimum: the only large "tax payers" making their contribution into Rambus’ treasury will remain Samsung and Sony. License fees make the biggest part of the company’s revenues, moreover, the court costs may turn out so huge that Rambus might easily appear close to bankruptcy.

And who is fond of buying all sorts of "flotsam and jetsam" most of all? Of course, this is VIA (remember, Cyrix, IDT, S3 graphics division). Just imagine what trumps VIA will suddenly get in the license argument with Intel. I believe that buying Rambus will quickly pay back as soon as VIA gets Intel’s license (which is most likely to be on preferential terms) for Pentium 4 chipsets and CPUs, as the supplies of VIA P4X266A/333 chipsets will grow up immensely.

However, these suppositions are much closer to science (or non-science) fiction rather than to real life. The matter is that the blocking holding of Rambus shares belongs to Intel, because they have formally fulfilled the terms of the agreement. According to this agreement, they had to get this holding at a fix price once the terms were fulfilled (because of this particular agreement i845 B-Step chipset was launched officially in January 2001 instead of December 2001, when the term of the agreement was over). And Intel will never agree to sell this holding to VIA, that’s for sure, as they’d better buy Rambus themselves. Anyway, the idea was great, don’t you think so? :)