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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: David B. who wrote (500)6/27/1996 9:54:00 PM
From: Paul Engel   of 1586543
 
David -

Your "surprise" that the box manufacturers haven't done anything about Intel's "monopoly" needs to be rectified.

In 1989 or 1990, Compaq invested between $10 million and $30 million in NexGEN, which at that time was trying to make an x86 chip to compete with Intel. Imagine what Intel thought when one of tehir majpr customers was funding a competitor!

I'm sure you're familiar with the NexGEN story of recent news - AMD forking out $700 - $800 million for it. In fact, a bunch of this dough flowed from AMD to Compaq.

Then, in 1991 Compaq, DEC, HP and SGI/MIPS all got together with a few other companies to form the ACE initiative (ACE = Advanced Computer Environment (?)). This was a direct attempt to challenge Intel's hegemony by establishing the MIPS architecture as an alternative platform for high end PCs.

Let me fast forward here - what has become of ACE? Long since forgotten and abandoned. Why - Intel provided superior products at superior prices. How many MIPS boxes do you see out there? Well, there is SGI and in a few months mabe NINTENDO. Whoopee.

So, many of the BOX manufacturers have tried to break the Intel dominance. The only problem is that Intel has continued to provide the best available devices for these manufacturers in the quantitities that they require for their own growth.

Remember this - People only hate OTHER PEOPLE's Monopolies.

Paul Engel
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