Hi all; Editorial on how Intel got in trouble, mentions Rambus:
Competition, Poor Planning Forced Intel Fumbles
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In the days when AMD was just another Silicon Valley acronym, Intel would engage four teams to design a product, with each team squaring off against the others at the end to pick a winner. The advantage of this, according to McComas, was that Intel could evaluate each competing design according to the conditions of the market and in fact change a design up until six months before its introduction. This multiple redundancy was an expensive but methodical approach to product planning.
Unfortunately, Intel could no longer afford the luxury of quadruple tracking and stopped it for two reasons: First, Intel's inability to predict the emergence of the low-end market resulted in scrapping the practice of building multiple teams to design one microprocessor. Instead it began allocating resources along product lines.
As a result, Intel lacked the resources necessary to build in backup plans for its products, robbing the company of many options that had helped to smooth its decision-making and production processes. Second, Intel faced credible competition from AMD that forced its designers to introduce products much faster than before.
Intel, however, tried to make up for the loss of multiple teams by acquiring companies for their technology. But this is where it got stumped. Intel's memory group, depleted of resources, was blindsided into accepting a contract with Rambus Inc., McComas believes.
"They had no backup plan for memory," McComas said. "If they had two or three of them, they wouldn't go for contracts like that." This was the beginning of Intel's troubles, and it led directly to the postponement of chipsets, the recall of about a million faulty motherboards and the delay of several microprocessors.
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electronicnews.com
-- Carl |
