Bert - Re:"- Collusion: what if Compaq, IBM, PB, HP, and NEC got sick of
Intel's bullying and collectively put their lot with Cyrix or AMD?..."
The author of this report appears to have done little or no research on Intel and its customers. Quite shallow of him, I'd say.
I have mentioned many time in this forum the ACE consortium which COMPAQ, HP, MIPS & DEC (and a few others) put together about 5 years ago to challenge Intel by creating a RISC-based platform (MIPS) that runs NT. Intel de-fused this, as history shows.
Keep in mind the dynamics of this ACE consortium. For example, DEC was instrumental in supporting the MIPS/NT platform, while secretly (?) hard at work on their own RISC processor (ALPHA) and their VMS/UNIX O/S for their own ALPHA chip.
COMPAQ was also a big investor in NexGEN, an Intel clone maker now owned by AMD. So, COMPAQ has a broad history of playing Brutus to Intel's Ceasar. They just haven't drawn as much blood as Brutus.
Consortiums, like CARTELS, come and go. They have been studied before and in greater detail than the author of the MIT report you cited. In reality, the individual members are all out for their own individual GAIN, hence they tend to self-destruct.
Paul |
