Memo to Self: When all else fails, return to the Smartphone Market!
The announcement by Intel earlier this week that they would come up short this quarter is a reminder that it is not growth, but very high growth that covers a Multitude of Economic Sins (many which are unforeseen). The semiconductor industry has had to endure three… Read More
Back in the 1990’s, Richard Branson, the legendary Entrepreneur and investor was asked how to become a millionaire, and he allegedly responded, “There’s really nothing to it. Start as a billionaire and then buy an airline.” I think the same principle can be applied to a large part of the Semiconductor… Read More
As mentioned in a previous post, Microsoft has started to come clean on its software strategy as it relates to Windows 8 for PCs and Tablets. The strategy has been changing quite rapidly since their first admission in September. Essentially the Windows 8 O/S will be forked based on whether the mobile device is operating on an x86 or… Read More
During the weekend, I read two articles that highlighted Apple’s LCD supply chain build out and started to think of how this would look if Apple were to do the same on the x86 side of the ledger. The two articles, one related to Hitachi and Sony building a new 4” LCD for iphones and a more extensive one on Sharp building a new LCD for the iPAD3… Read More
Tensilica has been around for quite a long time. Their key technology is a system for generating a custom processor, the idea being to better match the requirement of the processor for performance, power and area as compared with a fully-general purpose control processor (such as one of the ARM processors). Of course generating… Read More
When Intel entered the server market in the 1990s with their Pentium Processor and follow on Xeons beginning in 1998, they focused on the simple enterprise applications. At the same time they laid the groundwork for what will turn out to be a multi-decade, long war to wrest control from all mainframes and workstations. The announcements… Read More
It is hard not to be impressed by Intel’s stunning financial performance since the 2008 downturn. They are on track to post revenue of $55B this year or 50% higher than 2008 while nVidia and AMD will be flat to less than 10% better. More significantly, earnings will be 3X that of 2008. More significantly, in the past 12 months they have… Read More
“Where’s the Taurus?” In the history of company turnarounds, it was one of the most penetrating and catalyzing opening questions ever offered by a new CEO to a demoralized executive team. The CEO was Alan Mullaly, who spent years at Boeing and at one point in the 1980s studied the successful rollout of the original Ford Taurus. For… Read More
The CEO panel at the 2nd GTC wasn’t especially enlightening. The theme was that going forward will require cooperation for success and everyone was really ready to cooperate.
The most interesting concept was Aart talking about moving from what he called “scale complexity” aka Moore’s law to what he … Read More
We received some good feedback from our article on Intel’s Back to the Future Buy of Micron and I thought I would present another story line that gives readers a better perspective of what may be possibly coming down the road. In this case, it is the story of AMD and Samsung partnering to counter Intel’s platform play with Micron. The… Read More
