The great leveling

"Yousuf Khan" wrote:

chrisv wrote:
I doubt that theory. They've known for years (possibly all along)
that Itanic was not going to take the world by storm. Certainly,
since the Rambus debacle, they have known that they can't force
whatever they want onto a resistant market.

Well, knowing about it is one thing, admitting to it is another.

The nature of their business is that they can't admit anything. If
they were to show any lack of confidence in Itanic's viability, it
would certainly be a self-fulfilling prophecy of it's death.

Of course Intel would like to use some of their CPU bounty to expand
into other markets and grow the business. I'm not convinced that
their product proliferation implies that they are desperate to fill
excess manufacturing capacity.

The WiFi chips I can understand, they have a support relationship to their
existing core business (CPUs). HDTV is another thing altogether.

Intel seems to have a history of flailing about when it comes to selling
products outside of its core business. It starts a business and then just as
abruptly kills them. Remember those home networking gear it used to sell at
one time? Also the webcams?

The "flailing about" is extremely typical of companies who have had a
very successful "cash cow" product, and then go looking for similar
success in other markets. It's not easy. Intel is fortunate that
their cash cow is still giving plenty of milk.

In fact, I think Intel is overlooking one of the commodities that it
has plenty of -- chip plants. It should start renting itself out to
other chipmakers to produce their chips, much like TSMC, UMC,
Chartered, SMIC, etc. I doubt they will do this, but it would fill
up their plants.

I'm certain it's crossed their minds, and if they're not doing it,
it's for a good reason (like the profit margins aren't high enough).

Or it may be worried that people would think that the reason it is producing
chips for other companies is because it can't fill up those fabs itself.

I don't know. Their balance sheet is a matter of public record. What
matters is the bottom line, and they're doing quite well, despite the
economic recession.

Robert Redelmeier wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Well, you can't run your business simply relying on lock-in
customers. The lock-ins will produce a steady state of
income, but not enough to run your business on.

Really? Do you think Microsoft isn't running profitably?
They currently have a lock-in on PC operating systems.

Yup, you're right, totally forgot about that lock-in showcase. I was
thinking more along the lines of "normal" companies like IBM or Sun, etc.

Yousuf Khan

chrisv wrote:
Well, knowing about it is one thing, admitting to it is another.

The nature of their business is that they can't admit anything. If
they were to show any lack of confidence in Itanic's viability, it
would certainly be a self-fulfilling prophecy of it's death.

But it's also often the case that if you can't admit something externally,
it's likely you're not admitting the same thing internally; you're not
admitting something to yourself. It strengthens your own case if you believe
it yourself. But that could also lead to unrealistic expectations, which can
lead to not doing things to fix your problems properly.

The "flailing about" is extremely typical of companies who have had a
very successful "cash cow" product, and then go looking for similar
success in other markets. It's not easy. Intel is fortunate that
their cash cow is still giving plenty of milk.

Yes.

I don't know. Their balance sheet is a matter of public record. What
matters is the bottom line, and they're doing quite well, despite the
economic recession.

Wall Street seems to be worrying right now about whether this is going to
last much longer. They don't just look at the bottom line, they look at the
trends behind the bottom line too.

Yousuf Khan

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 02:44:45 -0400, Tony Hill wrote:

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004 00:10:12 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote:

Yousuf Khan wrote:

Robert Myers wrote:

As to analysts, the sales forecasts having been so useless in the
past, why would anyone take to believing them now?


Comedic relief?


[dropped comp.sys.intel so I don't get pulled over by the OT police]

I think analyst's estimates are a form of intellectual reinsurance
("Well, of course it's BS, but what else do you want me to rely on--my
own BS? My dart board?").

What do _you_ think Yousuf? Will Itanium die while Power and Sparc
survive? All three chips look more like expensive hobbies than
realistic business propositions (and a dart board looks really
attractive for predicting the future of that market segment).

My personal dart board has both Itanium and SPARC dying out in the
not-too-distant future, at least for the high-end of things (legacy
support will of course continue for quite some time). Really I only
see a bright future for three processor ISAs: x86, PowerPC and ARM.

No comment. ;-]

While Power at the high-end might not be a good money-making venture,
the ISA in general has some pretty good support throughout various
market segments. In particular it seems to be doing very well in the
console market and the high-end of the embedded market. At the
top-end with the Power servers it might not make much money, but it
helps push the development for the more profitable chips further down
the line.

ARM, of course, is probably the top selling ISA out there these days
(with the possible exception of some really low-end/low-cost stuff
like 6805 or 8051), and it will probably continue doing well on the
really low-power front.

ARM isn't low-cost? 8051 isn't low cost? I guess PICs aren't "low cost"
either then. ;-) I think you'll find rather a large number of PICs (and
8051s) out there. ;-)

x86, meanwhile, seems likely to continue dominating the desktop and
workstation market for the foreseeable future while constantly taking
away server marketshare from the traditional big-iron machines.

I don't see x86 dominating the "workstation market" today. I think it
easily could, but I don't see it today.

At least.. that's how I see things going. Now, if you don't mind
stepping aside, I have a few more darts to throw :

....never stand in the way of a Canuckistani with sharp weapons.
^
+-- see: even I can learn how to speel.

--
Keith

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 07:59:12 -0500, chrisv
wrote:

"Yousuf Khan" wrote:

In fact, I think Intel is overlooking one of the commodities that it has
plenty of -- chip plants. It should start renting itself out to other
chipmakers to produce their chips, much like TSMC, UMC, Chartered, SMIC,
etc. I doubt they will do this, but it would fill up their plants.

I'm certain it's crossed their minds, and if they're not doing it,
it's for a good reason (like the profit margins aren't high enough).

Another thing to think of is that Intel has such a varied product line
up that, no matter what they were asked to produce, Intel would
probably already have their own competing product. Now for some
companies this would not be a problem, but Intel does NOT play nice
with others. They've never really been a company that was good at
partnerships and alliances beyond the "We design and build it, you
sell it" sort of thing.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:02:54 -0400, keith wrote:

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 02:44:45 -0400, Tony Hill wrote:
ARM, of course, is probably the top selling ISA out there these days
(with the possible exception of some really low-end/low-cost stuff
like 6805 or 8051), and it will probably continue doing well on the
really low-power front.

ARM isn't low-cost? 8051 isn't low cost? I guess PICs aren't "low cost"
either then. ;-) I think you'll find rather a large number of PICs (and
8051s) out there. ;-)

Err, unless my eyes are deceiving me, I mentioned that 6805 and 8051
ARE the "really low-end/low-cost" stuff. PIC falls into this category
as well, even if the top-end PIC chips cost $20-$30 in volume.

x86, meanwhile, seems likely to continue dominating the desktop and
workstation market for the foreseeable future while constantly taking
away server marketshare from the traditional big-iron machines.

I don't see x86 dominating the "workstation market" today. I think it
easily could, but I don't see it today.

I'd say that it does, with the possible exception of certain high-end
niche markets. Certainly there are still 64-bit Unix workstations
being sold, but almost all of those are being abandoned. Sun is
hurting in this market badly, SGI is getting out of it altogether and
HPaq is doing the same with their PA-RISC and Alpha lines. I suppose
there still are HP's Itanium workstations, but from what I've seen
they aren't exactly racking up record sales by any stretch. That
pretty much leaves IBM's Power workstations as the last bastion of
new, high-end Unix workstations.

Of course, I guess a lot of this depends on just how you classify
"workstation" vs. "desktop". Depending on that classification the
exact marketshare for any one ISA could vary greatly.

At least.. that's how I see things going. Now, if you don't mind
stepping aside, I have a few more darts to throw :

...never stand in the way of a Canuckistani with sharp weapons.
^
+-- see: even I can learn how to speel.

And don't you forget it!

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 13:02:54 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote:

George Macdonald wrote:

Who is that talking in quotes though?:-)... the corporate system buyer?...
the stock speculator?... the system mfr? Intel has certainly gotten a lot
of mileage, PR-wise out of the wild forecasts by analysts... and there's
never a day of final reckoning where facts have to be faced down and denied
or accepted. Nobody ever says: "**** IDC - they're useless... ignore
them". Conspiracy?... err, I hope not!


I don't think you need a conspiracy. Why would an analyst with no
working engineers or scientists want to try to outguess Intel? And
there is the fact that, aside from being an investment vehicle itself,
Intel is an investor, and, like all investors, likes to be told what it
wants to hear.

More importantly here though is that Intel was undoubtedly delirious with
joy to have IDC trot out this guff to the media, investors, IT execs etc.

As to who would buy analyst projections, I'd think that just about
anybody who needed to plug a related number into a spreadsheet and had
to be able to defend it would be a potential customer. Everybody in the
business has to be (or should be) wondering where the center of gravity
of the industry is headed. If the analysts really did know, their
predictions would be extremely valuable, I would think. They don't
really know, but a guess based on accepted methodology is much better,
or at least safer, than nothing. I thought you were in OR. Your stuff
works better? ;-).

When the guesses are that bad the "accepted methodology" is worthless..
worse. Nobody at IDC seems to have err, noticed?? In the absence of legal
responsibility, you'd think a free market would take its course. My only
involvement with OR data has been after the guessing stage.:-)

What do _you_ think Yousuf? Will Itanium die while Power and Sparc
survive? All three chips look more like expensive hobbies than
realistic business propositions (and a dart board looks really
attractive for predicting the future of that market segment).


Without inside knowledge it's hard to be sure but IBM has tremendous depth
and scope for using their designs across a range of internal developments
as well as selling merchant chips in several derivative forms...
sustainable?... I dunno...

IBM sold its Power 440 IP and I gather its commitment to being a
supplier to Apple is less than certain. IBM did form the Systems and
Technology Group, apparently giving up on the idea that Microelectronics
could stand on its own profitability. That signals a commitment to
Power and allows them to hide just how much Power is really costing
them. The subtext, though, is that Power, on its own, is never going to
be a money-maker. How long will IBM be willing or able to tough it out?
Right now, the evidence is that IBM has made the right choice and HPaq
the wrong choice. Over the long run? I still think a proprietary chip
is running against the tide. Only time will tell.

IBM sold Power 440 IP? Are you talking about the AMCC deal? Didn't look
like an outright sale to me - just a license of some IP with a takeover of
some responsibility for logistics & marketing. I don't think their picture
is anywhere as bleak as you paint it and I don't see, with the IBM
infrastructure, why a processor group would have to show a profit on its
own.

... but I think I have at least as good an idea as
any err, analyst. When something like Alpha can turn rotten, anything can
happen.

I'm amazed at the bandwidth that has been consumed on Alpha without much
of anybody facing up to what happened the the chip was too expensive
to be a merchant chip and the software base never fully materialized.
Where is Windows on Power, anyway?

Yeah well like DEC, err Digital, I guess IBM just gave up on pouring money
into Windows for Power, or Risc6K or whatever it was called at the time.
As for Alpha, surely the cost of making the chip could have been fixed -
the fab was ancient by the time Intel agreed to take it over. Digital's
half hearted efforts at targeting the workstation, never mind the desktop,
seemed more to blame to me.

So will we end up with just x86-64 and ARM as *the* computer
architectures to choose from?

Aside from the embedded market, maybe.

I thought ARM *is* the embedded market or are you thinking of the bottom
end of it more?

The problem (as always, from my limited perspective) is that none of the
revolutions in microprocessor design have really been revolutions in the
sense that they answered questions there was a big payoff for anwering.
Intel thought IA64 was a revolution that answered an important
question (how to get significant parallelism without recoding
everything), but other architectures have been just about as successful
(or unsuccessful) in achieving the same goal.

It's not as if there were no important questions worth asking--latency
tolerance, moving data around as the virtual real estate gets larger,
and, of course, power consumption--come to mind, but the demand drivers
just aren't big enough to drive a real revolution. Maybe if (say)
google succeeds in its plans for world domination and needs a real low
power revolution the way HPC needs a low power revolution.

Revolutions are rare and I don't see why they'd be necessary as a sign of
success. Steady progress with the odd discontinuity works fine for me.:-)

What will the Chinese do?... do they
matter?shrug

Of course they matter, but not soon enough for any but the most foolish
to speculate how.

So far they're showing signs of going in the wrong direction - unique
national standards for wireless could be just the start of something bigger
and more destructive... their version of "playing by the rules"?? It's
hardly a homogeneous culture so, with increased awareness of freedoms
enjoyed elsewhere, I expect lots of Chechnya type unrest and attempted
devolutions in the future. Many in the West who fear them economically
make the mistake of regarding them as a monolithic society - IMO no where
near as dangerous as they are painted.

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??

George Macdonald wrote:

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 13:02:54 GMT, Robert Myers
wrote:


George Macdonald wrote:


snip


IBM sold Power 440 IP? Are you talking about the AMCC deal? Didn't look
like an outright sale to me - just a license of some IP with a takeover of
some responsibility for logistics & marketing.

quote

http://www.siliconstrategies.com/art...estid=20 8096

IBM to sell PowerPC line to AMCC for $227 million (Updated)

Silicon Strategies
04/13/2004, 8:35 AM ET

SAN DIEGO--Applied Micro Circuits Corp. (AMCC) on Tuesday (April 13)
announced a plan to acquire intellectual property and the assets
associated with IBM Corp.'s 400 series of embedded PowerPC standard
products for about $227 million in cash.

AMCC has also taken a license for IBM's Power Architecture. IBM will
continue to manufacture the PowerPC products for AMCC. The agreement
also provides AMCC with access to IBM's advanced CMOS process and
systems-on-a-chip (SoC) design methodology.

/quote

The fact that there are underlying required licencses associated with
the Power architecture is an important detail (just ask anybody who has
a Unix source code license), but short of IBM completely divesting
itself of the Power architecture, I don't see how much more of an
outright sale the deal could have been.

I don't think their picture
is anywhere as bleak as you paint it and I don't see, with the IBM
infrastructure, why a processor group would have to show a profit on its
own.


"Bleak" is a pretty loaded word.

Power _doesn't_ have to show a profit on its own, and it could continue
indefinitely as the copestone of IBM's high end strategy. IBM has
really gotten smart about open source, and maybe it will be able to
sustain critical mass for Power with it's low-end Linux-only boxes. Or
maybe it won't.

snip

As for Alpha, surely the cost of making the chip could have been fixed -
the fab was ancient by the time Intel agreed to take it over.

Who knows? Probably compared to the cost of what has actually happened
with Itanium, doing whatever needed to be done to bring Alpha completely
into the Intel juggernaut would seem to be a bargain in retrospect. It
probably didn't look that way at the time the decision was made.

Chipmaking has to involve alchemy. What costs are immutable and what
costs are not and how are those costs tied to design? Like I would have
a clue.

snip

So will we end up with just x86-64 and ARM as *the* computer
architectures to choose from?

Aside from the embedded market, maybe.


I thought ARM *is* the embedded market or are you thinking of the bottom
end of it more?


John Mashey has recently mentioned both the embedded market and
Tensilica more than once as examples of interesting action in computer
architecture, and there are some really hot network processors that have
appeared recently. I don't know what end that is, but I don't think any
of those processors have an ARM heritage.


The problem (as always, from my limited perspective) is that none of the
revolutions in microprocessor design have really been revolutions in the
sense that they answered questions there was a big payoff for anwering.
Intel thought IA64 was a revolution that answered an important
question (how to get significant parallelism without recoding
everything), but other architectures have been just about as successful
(or unsuccessful) in achieving the same goal.

It's not as if there were no important questions worth asking--latency
tolerance, moving data around as the virtual real estate gets larger,
and, of course, power consumption--come to mind, but the demand drivers
just aren't big enough to drive a real revolution. Maybe if (say)
google succeeds in its plans for world domination and needs a real low
power revolution the way HPC needs a low power revolution.


Revolutions are rare and I don't see why they'd be necessary as a sign of
success. Steady progress with the odd discontinuity works fine for me.:-)


You and Keith, except that I think, given the choice, Keith would
dispense with the odd discontinuity.

How many revolutions are at play here? Automatic computation, c. WWII.
The transistor, 1947. Integrated circuits, 1957. The microprocessor,
c. 1970. The personal computer, (as a real revolution, 1977-1981,
giving the Apple II and the IBM PC a tie). I think we're overdue.


What will the Chinese do?... do they
matter?shrug

Of course they matter, but not soon enough for any but the most foolish
to speculate how.


So far they're showing signs of going in the wrong direction - unique
national standards for wireless could be just the start of something bigger
and more destructive... their version of "playing by the rules"?? It's
hardly a homogeneous culture so, with increased awareness of freedoms
enjoyed elsewhere, I expect lots of Chechnya type unrest and attempted
devolutions in the future. Many in the West who fear them economically
make the mistake of regarding them as a monolithic society - IMO no where
near as dangerous as they are painted.

Fortune magazine has a new article on Intel in China and on the
potential competitive threat from a Chinese semiconductor industry
(available on the net, but only with a subscription). The Chinese
apparently already have a home-grown chip that would compete with the
Pentium II.

The bigger picture for China over the longer haul? I have the same
skepticism you do: big, unwieldy society with adolescent ambition and
tremendous infrastructure problems.

RM

Robert Myers wrote:

The bigger picture for China over the longer haul? I have the same
skepticism you do: big, unwieldy society with adolescent ambition and
tremendous infrastructure problems.

Maybe, but when the "adolescent" weighs 4 times as much as you do, he
doesn't have to be "better" than you to kick your ass, and it's going
to be a loooong time before the costs of making things there approach
the costs of making things in the Western world... They can just
throw (inexpensive) people at all of their problems.

Tony Hill wrote:
Another thing to think of is that Intel has such a varied product line
up that, no matter what they were asked to produce, Intel would
probably already have their own competing product. Now for some
companies this would not be a problem, but Intel does NOT play nice
with others. They've never really been a company that was good at
partnerships and alliances beyond the "We design and build it, you
sell it" sort of thing.

This would be what would prevent Intel from getting a lot of business from
other semi mfgs, if Intel were to set itself up as a contract fabber. Too
many enemies which it would need to convert into customers. For some of
them, it's bridges might already be irretrievably burned.

Yousuf Khan