Interview w/ Eric, Part XI
A. Well if by this you are referring to a possible transition of
some of the business to mother board, this doesn't bother us or
worry us at all because we are players in this segment of the
market. We don't believe it is a large segment. Nor will it
become a large segment because it is still a very fast changing
field. And there is still a lot of new things that have to go into
this communication subsystem frontend. Often times it is a
bother, it is a constraint to have everything hard coded in the
mother board itself.
Nevertheless, there are segments which will be perfectly
acceptable. And therefore we will compete in that business, and
in fact we are today. If you open a Dell Computer right now you
will see that it has 3Com chips on its mother board. You will
also see that some other Dell Computers have 3Com NICs in
them.
So the fact that Intel is there with silicon expertise has not
really helped them all that much from a technical standpoint. The
factories that they use will always give priority to Pentiums and
processors. Paradoxically, this is a semi-conductor company
that is a bit like the cobbler who mistreats his children. In other
words, we are going to get better, more advanced technology
from our foundries than we would if we were a division of Intel.
Indeed today they use fairly old, outdated technology that has a
higher flaws- per-die than we do. We use smaller geometries.
We have higher yields on our fab lines. And all of this gives us
the technological advantage.
But if we go back to the fundamental trend in the industry, which
is end-to-end connectivity, it's very clear to us that a piece of
the network that exists in a computer or in an appliance on a
connected organizer or a server, is an integral part of the
connectivity chain that cuts across the entire network. It has to
evolve in synchrony with the rest.
When you add new protocols, when you add policy intelligence,
when you add encryption, when you add quality of service, it has
to be end to end. It has to be incorporated in that sub system. So
we believe that the dynamic that drive this piece of the computer
are very different from the dynamics that drive the MIPS inside
the processors. |
