Interesting article from Joel Hruska on ExtremeTech: Nvidia deeply unhappy with TSMC, claims 22nm essentially worthless . The title is a bit dramatic (poetic license) but the charts are accurate to the degree that 20nm costs will be significantly higher from the start and will continue to be higher throughout production and maturity.… Read More
Holman Jenkins, the distinguished writer of business trends for the Wall St. Journal, recently penned an article entitled “The End of Apple’s Roach Motel?” (Personally, I think that since Apple is in California, he should have used Hotel California in his title), questioning the iPhone and iPAD maker of its ability to continue… Read More
After the introduction of the NEWiPAD, Apple has placed itself just two short steps away from dominating the computer market – including PCs. One step, which is widely reported, is a smaller iPAD with an 8” screen that aims for a $299 price point. Amazon will take the rest of the market under $299. The second step is purely speculation… Read More
With the introduction of the “New iPAD”, we now have the 2012 benchmark for the tablet market, including the offerings that will come from Amazon later in the year. As has been noted earlier, with each new mobile product iteration Apple unmoors itself from the PC foundations of Microsoft, Intel and even nVidia and AMD. At the unveiling… Read More
This time is differentis a book that was released just months before the financial crises in 2008 describing hundreds of historical cases where smart people ended up making disastrous decisions over the span of 800 years that led to government defaults, banking panics etc… In the semiconductor industry, we also tend to think this… Read More
The Corporate PC may finally be on life supports and with it the purveyors of the hardware and software solutions as consumer adoption of new technology outpaces the carefully planned IT budgets that guarantee positive 3 year Returns on Investments (ROI). The Apple of the consumer’s eye will soon feast on the iPAD 3 with its retina… Read More
There is one semiconductor company that for the last 3 years has outperformed ARM and more than doubled in stock price relative to Apple. They are everywhere but barely known to most. The success of this company in the coming year though could result in the leveling of AMD and nVidia as they try to adjust to the economics of the mobile… Read More
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
The video and slides of the CEDA lunch from a month or two ago are now (finally) up here. Chris Malachowsky presented “Watt’s next.” Chris is one of the founders of nVidia and is currently its senior VP of research. He started by talking a bit about the nVidia product line but moved on to talking about supercomputers… Read More
