Intel's Expensive Disco Ball 324
Re-Pawn writes "From the NY Times: The
Disco Ball of Failed Hopes and Other Tales From Inside Intel (Registration
Required.)
Seems like Intel is losing market share to other chip makers - this
article highlights a few problems that Intel has had including one very expensive
disco ball made from a failed attempt to produce projection televisions."
come on (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if you are doing this as a showcase of bad ideas, let's link a few more interesting samples.
Interesting thought for youall: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:NYTimes :( (Score:2, Insightful)
Is about time! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:come on (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but I think the point is that Intel is somewhat lacking in the "recent successes" department to cover the losses on the failures - For now they're still happily on top of the market, and that is their strength, but they are losing mindshare, which really is crucial. The more that other chips are seen as perfectly viable options the faster Intel could lose market share.
There is, of course, no reason to go counting them out just yet. I'm sure Intel has plenty of fight left, and potentially a few cards still up their sleeve. Compared to their position 3 or 4 years ago however, they are not looking anywhere near so good.
Jedidiah.
an article about a silicon disco ball... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:come on (Score:5, Insightful)
The words "news of Intel's death were greatly exagerated," come to mind.
It's like Microsoft wringing their hands over Linux; they _should_ be paying attention, but they've got a long way to go before they become number 2.
TW
Craig Barrett has been a failure as CEO (Score:3, Insightful)
Even marketshare and technology takes a back seat to obsession over the closing price of the stock...this is what you get for obsessing over the very short term.
Re:come on (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Centrino was a definite win for Intel. That means they're doing well in the laptop market, but are losing share on the desktop. And yes, AMD is not without its own issues: The Opteron hasn't been doing quite as well as they would like [theregister.co.uk]. That's not exactly fatal, but its not exactly great press either.
So, in summary: laptop: Intel, desktop: AMD, server: still up for grabs. The question is whether the laptop market will supercede the desktop market - certainly the laptop market is growing faster... it may have a lower ceiling though, and there's always Apple and the Power chips to compete with there, and Apple is quite strong in laptops.
Only time will tell.
Jedidiah.
Re:amd is not the competition (Score:5, Insightful)
They are both about to get blown out of the water by Apple.
Apple is about to introduce an entertainment server. Everyone knows the future is networked consoles, but Sony et al are still focusing on games only. Apple will introduce a device that will displace the PC in a very short time. Fortunately their suppliers have horrible fab capacity. It wouldn't surprise me if Apple built in x86 if their volumes get high enough.
My bet is on the apple device."
You are so full of shit that you don't understand up from down.
1: Apple does not, and will not manufacture or design CPUs.
2: AMD *does* design and manufacture CPUs.
Intel and Apple *don't* compete because they don't manufacture the same products. Intel competes with AMD, Transmeta, IBM, VIA, Samsung, and other companies in a variety of fields.
Apple competes with software companies - like Microsoft, PC companies - like Dell, and, more recently, with
"Apple is about to introduce an entertainment server. Everyone knows the future is networked consoles, but Sony et al are still focusing on games only. Apple will introduce a device that will displace the PC in a very short time."
A media server is going to "displace" the PC? What a load of crap. Analysts have been spelling doom for the PC for *years*. Cellphones were going to kill the PC. Or PDAs. Or "smart" TVs.
Guess what? It's never happened. Because the PC is the best tool for communication. You can't displace the PC with a media center because, for most people, the PC isn't a media center. Most people use their PCs to get on the Internet. They surf the web and read email. A media server isn't going to displace that.
"It wouldn't surprise me if Apple built in x86 if their volumes get high enough."
Assuming your crackpot theory is correct, who do you think is going to manufacture those x86 chips?
AMD or Intel. That's who. They are the only companies producing high-performance x86 CPUs. Heck, they are the only companies *capable* of producing a high-performance x86 cpu in the short term.
"Everyone knows the future is networked consoles"
If by "everyone", you mean crackpot analysts, then, yes, "everyone" knows that.
Remember the PS2 hype? With it's FireWire and USB ports, the PS2 was supposed to be the "future networked console". It wasn't. It's just another game system, just like the XBOX. The PS2 hasn't killed the PC.
"Fortunately their suppliers have horrible fab capacity."
IBM can fab a lot more than you think. Not as much as AMD or Intel, but they have the resources to bring Apple as many PPC970 CPUs as they will need.
[OT] (Score:2, Insightful)
Why I've prefered AMD over Intel for years (Score:3, Insightful)
AMD makes good products. I've NEVER been burned when buying AMD processors. I've been buying them since the K6 chips.
I once had a machine that would periodically crash (K6/2). I thought it was just windows, since windows crashed a fair amount anyway. One day on a whim I opened up the case and discovered the CPU fan was burned out. I'd been running it that way for over a year. I put a new fan in it and all was well.
I had a P4 cpu fan go bad.. it was toast by the time I knew about it.
I haven't tried that trick with newer AMD chips, but that experience was enough for me to stick with them since. Plus they're still usually cheaper.
Re:come on (Score:5, Insightful)
*Sigh* (Score:1, Insightful)
In other words, it will take me more time to sort through the marketing bullshit to see what's really there.
Unlike the typical luddite (forced to learn the technology), I prefer to know how the parts in my system work.
I could buy a "portable centrino solution" (basically a pentium-m with integrated 802.11b/g) but I could just as easily buy a laptop with an external, better network card for cheaper.
I don't like it when companies generalize for me. I don't like the term "gaming computer" or "workstation computer". What I do like is the performance I see in Athlon 64 4000+ benchmarks. Sorry but for my "gaming computer" a pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with 512 MB RAM doesn't cut it. I so often see this is the case.
What some companies call "gaming computers" I call a mid level workstation.
i.e. A Pentium 4 2.8Ghz with 512 MB of RAM and a Geforce FX 5600 is NOT a "gaming machine". I would call that a satisfactory computer for any use.
Point being, I hate when companies generalize.
Re:Just Desserts for Intel (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just Desserts for Intel (Score:3, Insightful)
Imagine a 100m race with four people, the first comes in at say 9.8 seconds and each following one comming in 0.01 seconds later. By Intel's alledged reasoning you dump the fourth guy because he is not up to the grade. Yet 9.83 seconds would probably put you in the top ten 100m times of all time.
Re:come on (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:come on (Score:4, Insightful)
One big difference is that those "good" companies were also smart: they didn't go to the press and the trade shows and drum up a lot of hype over their R&D projects, saying they'd be releasing products based on them very soon. Yes, IBM did make the Linux wristwatch, but they also made it very clear this was simply a research project, and nothing more, and would not show up in stores any time soon. Intel made all kinds of noise about how they'd revolutionize the big-screen TV market with their LCOS technology, and it didn't work.
This is not a way to inspire confidence in your company. The old story of the boy who cried wolf is very applicable here.
Re:Why I've prefered AMD over Intel for years (Score:2, Insightful)
I've learned my lesson on cheap hardware. It's not as cheap as it seems at Fry's.
Why is it *SO* hard ... (Score:4, Insightful)
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF
How do I get into the 'get kickbacks from NYT for submitting stories to
Re:NYT (Score:3, Insightful)
Its just a royal pain in the ass. Who is it that keeps submitting NYT stories, and how hard would it be for them (or the ed) to quick hit googles newspage, and a link to the same story that actually *links to* the story.
It should be part of the basic checks - the links given as part of a story submission should actually go to the story and not redirect to a login form. It defeats the entire point of the link.
Re:Just Desserts for Intel (Score:2, Insightful)
Jaysyn
American neoliberal/laisseiz faire capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
25% of what? You could have a room full of certified genius, but there would still be a bottom 25%
THat is the core of the American-style neoliberal, laissez faire capitalism. It is darwinism. What's old is new again. THis is the way America was run for centuries, even before it was a country. Law of the jungle. We turned out backs on this earlier this century (New Deal, labor unions, etc), but now we are regressing to hypercompetitiveness. Europe is way way ahead of us in keeping hypercompetitiveness at bay.
And it is not just the tech companies that do this. Many other high profile industries do this. Most law firms do this, at least the larger ones, and many smaller ones. The weakest performers of the bunch are told to leave every year. And the weakest performers are not bad, but they are just relatively weakest.
The officer corps of the American armed services do the same: up, or out.
Insanity, as far as I am concerned. And we swim in currents of death, all around us. Our lives are so short, and yet we subject ourselves to this nonsense. I can understand it in young people. They are too green, too inexperienced to see the forest for the trees. But why don't more older people call Bullshit on this? We have the ability to make our lives better. Why not do so?
Re:This guy sounds like Carly @ Hp.. oh dear god (Score:3, Insightful)
I think people said that in 1978.. and 1985.. 1989.. and 1994.. and blah blah blah.
There is a long way to go before we hit the physical limits of existing technology. Then there is the technology that hasn't been invented yet. I'd like to own stock in the company that is most likely to come up with the latter, thanks.
Re:Registration Not Required (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the attractions of conspiracy theories is the flattery of imagining you are important enough to spawn a conspiracy.
Re:Registration Not Required (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:come on (Score:3, Insightful)
failure to correctly estimate market demand.
failure to ramp up production to meet demand.
the failure to meet demand means the prices are driven up, which in turn means intel is selling less product than they could have -- it is lost revenue.
it also negatively impacts their product penetration, as cheaper alternatives can more easily compete -- so they lose market share as well.
Re:This guy sounds like Carly @ Hp.. oh dear god (Score:3, Insightful)
That may be true, but we may currently be very close to the economic limits. You simply can't crank the average power consumption of a PC beyond 200W before people start rejecting them because of power bills and excess heat. In the past, all problems with chip performance were made better by shrinking the die. However, the chip companies have recently gotten to the point where power consumption getting worse with geometry shrinks.
In the 1960s, everybody assumed that supersonic planes would become common. After all, the technical problems had been solved and military planes were routinely hitting mach 3. However, real-world economic factors arose and 40 years later all commercial air traffic is still subsonic.
We may hit a similar situation with CPUs: Shure, you could go faster, but for 99.9% of the applications, it just costs too much.
Re:come on (Score:3, Insightful)
A couple of times in the past, AMD themselves had come out CPUs that compared very favorably to Intel's then-current chips. However, they ran into fab problems and never got production and market share up before the next cycle where Intel leapfrogged them. That was certainly a failure; they didn't recoup enough of their investments and AMD's very survival has been in question a couple of times. It's taken many years for them to battle back from their past mishaps into their current apparently healthy state.
Re:Just Desserts for Intel (Score:2, Insightful)
Depends how it works. Honeywell, nee Allied Signal, and GE, run the plan more or less like this: Take a new job and you are exempt from the ranking system for two years. After that, you get ranked just like everybody else. Now, if the new guy who screws up can't get blamed, who does? This clever scheme tends to promote two things: Job hopping, and more experienced employees disappearing. The disappearance of more experienced employees also just happens to cut labor and pension costs for these two very bottom line oriented companies. Cute, eh? Pre-merger Honeywell (Honeywell + Allied Signal = "Honeywell") had an average employee retention of ~ 16 years. Allied Sigal ~ 6 years. You do the math. The practically guaranteed terminations also, no doubt, work wonders for the culture and work environment.
Re:Just Desserts for Intel (Score:2, Insightful)
So that bottom 25% might still be damn good, but they might have other issues.