Processor Direction (was PowerHouse in the next 3 years?)

[Edis, Robert]

Thanks for the info Darren

Technology (and other areas of commercial enterprise) seems to be heading
for a situation of only 2 or 3 big players in any given market space who
control 90+% of the market.  The remaining 10-% will be fought over by small
new comers and niche players, all of whom stand the chance of being bought
up by one of the biggies if successful.  We can see this trend with hardware
manufacturers, car rental companies, car manufacturers, DoD suppliers,
health care, petroleum, you name it.  Even the funeral home industry has
been largely consolidated.

The inevitable results in such industry consolidation is that redundant
technology (I'm saying inferior) is disposed of (albeit slowly so as to deal
with backlash from customers) to avoid competing revenue streams in the new
mega-corp.  *Sometimes* there is enough consumer demand to support multiple
"brands" but there is always the conflict between "the bottom line" and
consumer sentiment.  Very little has to do with quality, appropriateness, or
other attributes that get in the way of making money.

The advantage of all this is that the big corps lose site of the future
which is often happening in the 10% of the market they ignore.  So the
little guy has a chance, not to compete in the same market as the
mega-corps, but in the opportunities they can't see.

So ends today's sermon. :)

Blue

-----Original Message-----
From: Darren Reely [mailto:darren.reely@latticesemi.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2003 12:18 PM
Cc: 'powerh-l@lists.swau.edu'
Subject: Processor Direction (was PowerHouse in the next 3 years?)


Blue,

Apparently IBM is producing Itanium boxes just as they do Pentium boxes, 
but they are also continuing development on their Power processor lines 
for both servers and lower end machines. They show no intentions of 
giving up on their own high performance processor.  Like the new AMD 
chip, IBMs 970 runs both 32bit and 64bit applications natively. The 
reason I know this much, is because I've been following rumors that 
Apple will soon use this chip. And the SPARC camp isn't sleeping either.

I hope your dead wrong regarding "Other processor technologies will fall 
by the wayside". If that occurs we will begin to see a slowdown to 
delivered performance increases. In large part, it is the competition 
that has been pushing us forward at such a fast rate. I think we'll 
continue to see healthy competition because people do like to have 
choices. Likely the selection is shrink.

Darren


Edis, Robert wrote:

>I agree, the Itanium IS an issue.  With HP-UX, True64, OpenVMS and MS
>Windows NT being ported to this processor it is definitely the way servers
>will go.  Other processor technologies will fall by the wayside due to
>economics over the next few years.  Alpha has/is being merged into the
>Itanium, the SPARC is getting long-in-the-tooth and I think IBM will use
the
>Itanium in preference to developing a new 64bit chip of its own.  The only
>possible contender will be AMD's Sledgehammer which has the advantage of
>running 32bit apps in native mode as well as 64bit apps.  The Itanium runs
>32bit apps in emulation mode I believe and therefore such apps run slower
on
>Itanium than on a 32bit CPU.
>
>  
>


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