The big problem with Rambus was that JEDEC came along with a design for DDR memory that offered most of the performance of Rambus at a much lower price point. On top of that, the Pentium 4 systems that Rambus memory was used in didn't push the memory to it's maximum potential. But at the time they had a contract with Intel whereby Intel was only allowed to produce Pentium 4 chipsets that support Rambus memory (no other memory standard) for a number of years. It was supposed to help Rambus lock up the market. What it actually did was add substantial cost to the price of Pentium 4 systems at a time when AMD was producing more competitive CPUs that used less expensive memory. It was ugly all around, unless you were AMD.
Of course, Rambus tried other ways of cornering the memory market too. They had a seat on JEDEC and intentionally submitted some of their patented technology to be incorporated into the DDR standard without telling anyone that they had patents pending on the tech. The thinking was that if Rambus memory won out, they'd make a fortune. If DDR won out, they'd sue everyone making it for patent infringement and make a fortune. It's been winding through the courts for awhile now, I'm not sure exactly how it turned out, but I know the FTC was going to come down pretty hard on them for their deceptive trade practices.
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CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Hyper-V
MCTS:System Center Virtual Machine Manager
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator
