Rambus going into the RAM business, will make DDR4 chipsets for servers

Rambus is going into business selling memory chipsets for servers, breaking from its traditional design and licensing business.

Rambus is famous for perhaps two things: the weird memory used in some Pentium 4-era systems and a long parade of patent court cases that saw the company reposition itself as a "technology licensing company" designing high-speed memory systems. The plan was for other memory companies to license the technology and build it into their own systems.

The new announcement marks a big change from that business. Although Rambus will not actually be manufacturing the chips itself—it will join the ranks of Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD, and others as a fabless manufacturer, responsible for the design of the chips but contracting a third party to build the things—it has designed the complete chipset, not just portions of the technology, and it will be selling them, too.