Robert said:
I'll be fascinated to see this work itself out.
This story has already died down. It seems to play itself out in
distinct intervals, and then the mainstream press seems to forget about
it. It started 11 months ago with the raid, it reawakened last week
with the indictment. And likely the next event will be the court trial
itself. Then after that, will be all of the civil trials.
You'll inevitably accuse me of moral relativism. I prefer to think of
myself as a pragmatist. The economics of hardware are different from
the economics of software. It's amazing that any of those companies
have been able to survive, with or without the malign intervention of
Intel. The inevitable march of progress in computer hardware, as it
was in automobiles, is toward a smaller and smaller number of players.
There is no win for consumers in trying to halt that progression.
If the auto industry is the model for this industry, then your
characterization of that industry is inaccurate. Not only is the auto
industry not shrinking down to a small number of players, it
continuously gets new players. At one time it was believed that the
only companies left standing would be the Detroit Big Three, especially
GM which had well over 50% of the worldwide marketshare. Now GM is down
around 30% worldwide, and some minor players have grown into major
world players over the past 30 years -- first the Japanese, and then
later the Koreans. Basically the auto industry seems to go in cycles of
consolidation followed by reinvigoration.
Hopefully that is the model for the microprocessor industry. Right now
it's starting to look as if we're only going to be left with two
players, Intel and AMD. That's less competition than I'd like to see in
this industry. Sure you'll have other semiconductor makers like IBM,
TI, Freescale, etc. who will make processors too, but they will be like
the truck makers are to the auto industry.
Intel, bye-the-bye, needs a credible competitor, and its credible
competitor for x86 is AMD. Intel has no interest in destroying AMD,
although Intel surely would like to limit x86 (won't happen, of
course--the market always wins). Microsoft, on the other hand, simply
buys up and/or annihilates competition. Microsoft's credible
competitor now is Linux. It's amazing that Microsoft even got near
the SCO, but the fact that they did shows just how nuts they are.
Don't know if you remember this, but Microsoft has actually invested
money into Apple and Corel in the past, after almost killing both of
them. It just woke up one day and figured if these guys go down,
they'll have no defence against the government calling them a monopoly.
I don't think Intel operates any differently, it in no way is helping
AMD, and it is usually just trying to pound AMD into the ground most of
the time. That's because Intel doesn't need to aid AMD, like Microsoft
need to aid Apple and Corel. However, if AMD got so badly pounded one
day, then Intel would have to come to the realization that it may need
to directly help AMD. But it hasn't come down to that yet.
Up until now, AMD has been bravely doing the "up by your own
bootstraps" method to compete against Intel. However, that'll only go
so far before Intel starts feeling threatened. This anti-trust case may
be the final push needed to get AMD on equal footing with Intel.
Everything balances out eventually.
AMD invented onboard memory controllers? You're filled with amazing
insights. Intel copied AMD64? What choice, exactly, did they have?
That's what AMD's monopolist friend Microsoft dictated. What Intel is
going to do about interconnect is a little fuzzy to me, but I'll be
startled to see hypertransport.
Who said invented? We were talking about innovation. And an onboard
memory controller is certainly an innovation that we have never seen
any other PC processor company try before.
Of course Intel copied AMD64, doesn't matter what their reason was.
Intel is trying to create CSI, which is a Hypertransport work-alike.
I'll be interested to see the Itanium drama play itself out, but the
drama of Itanium at this point has to do with business issues, not
technology.
All of their business issues were as a result of a rejection of their
technology.
Yousuf Khan