Kemble - you're comparing iron ore and galvanized steel sheet here. There are two layers of the industry between the work IBM is doing at the semiconductor level and the things DELL needs for its products...
Doesn't have the engineering talent? What about my first condition? What if they were working with?...or perhaps will be with further partnering?
There are a couple of ways that IBM's silicon fab business gets connected to the computer business. One, other semiconductor manufacturers, like AMD, can get design, process and even fabrication assitance to make their processors. Companies which need custom ASICs, like Unisys, CPQ and others who do base silicon design but do not have fabrication capability, can use IBM as their Fab - this is like the relationship between SUNW and TI around SPARC. And, of course, OEMs like DELL can buy the products that IBM produces, like PowerPC.
But there is nothing for DELL to "work on" with IBM - DELL does not have ASIC engineers and does not do their own chips, and IBM does not make any processors which DELL can use.
There is of course the possibility that DELL could do some specialty processor - for a handheld device, for example - but there are already a lot of those chips available. DELL has not even moved down the food chain to do specialty support chips... DELL is just not a vertically integrated company, they have the thinnest, flattest horizontal model going.
Secondly, DELL has servers...so, why wouldn't this chip possibly be used in their servers? No - IBM does not make chips which DELL could use in servers and has no plans to do so. The technology that IBM is developing for SOI might eventually be used by Intel, or AMD if they go into server chips... but that still leaves DELL as a buyer of the end product, not a semiconductor developer. |
