Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, had an edict that each business unit needed to be #1 or #2 in the market or else he sold it off. HP is #1 in PC market share but it is exiting a business that it no longer can control and soon will bleed a lot of cash. HP’s Operating margin is under 6% and falling while Apple’s is at 40% and growing. So the question… Read More
Intel’s Back to the Future Buy of Micron
In an interview that Gordon Moore gave in early 2000, the former co-founder of Intel recounted how they abandoned the DRAM market in the early 1980s in order to exit the increasingly unprofitable business and focus on the promising, yet still young x86 processor market. Intel was also home to EEPROM and NOR Flash, two memory technologies… Read More
Captain Ahab Calls Out for the Merger of nVidia and AMD
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago –in the mid 1990s – having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail the startup ship Cyrix and see the watery part of the PC world. Whenever I find myself grim about the mouth or pause before coffin warehouses, and bring up the rear of every funeral… Read More
TSMC 28nm and 20nm Update!
First, I would like to congratulate Samsung on their first 20nm test chip press release. Some will say it is a foundry rookie mistake since real foundries do not discuss test chip information openly. I like it because it tells us that Samsung is 6-9 months BEHIND the number one foundry in the world on the 20nm (gate-last HKMG) process… Read More
Will AMD Crash Intel’s $300M Ultrabook Party?
Let’s face it, the ships are burning in the harbor and there is only one way out of here for AMD. It needs to crash Intel’s exclusive $300M Ultrabook Party in order to grab a slice of the future, more profitable PC market.
Intel Capital Creates $300 Million Ultrabook Fund… Read More
Apple Roadmaps Intel to 14nm
Intel will not win the tablet market with any of the various Atom chips rolling out at 32nm, 22nm and even 14nm. They are too late to a game that Apple owns 90% of today and will so in the future. All of these ultra low power atom versions are like the Saturn test rocket developments that preceded the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. They are necessary… Read More
Apple Strength Will Compel ARM to Trim its Sails
ARM’s move into the broad Tablet and PC space is based on lining up as many partners as possible to attack Intel from multiple angles. It’s a strategy not so different from what Intel employed in the early PC days. However, the strategy is unraveling as Apple and Samsung have reached market share domination without ARM’s merchant… Read More
Intel’s Mobile Deja Vu All Over Again Moment
We have been here before… and when I say “we” I do include myself. Back in 1997, I joined a secretive company called Transmeta. The company was two years old and working on a new x86 microprocessor to challenge Intel. The original focus of the company was not to build a lower power processor, but one that was faster. As with… Read More
Global Technology Conference 2011
Competition is what made the semiconductor industry and semiconductors themselves what they are today! Competition is what drives innovation and keeps costs down. Not destructive competition, where the success of one depends on the failure of another, but constructive competition that promotes mutual survival and growth… Read More
Intel Q2 Financial Secret: “Shhhh….We’re on Allocation”
Every Semiconductor Analyst has given Intel the once over a hundred times about their slowing PC unit volume. They are looking in the wrong place because the true secret of the Q2 earnings – in my humble opinion – is that Intel’s factories are full and parts are on allocation. What???
Check it out, high-end, 8 and 10 core XEON processors… Read More
Achieving Seamless 1.6 Tbps Interoperability for High BW HPC AI/ML SoCs: A Technical Webinar with Samtec and Synopsys