Jack -
Regarding your comment:
"Paul mentioned the ceo's ego,
which I don't think is too important, but he also mentioned that these
people came from the Intel "troika" which is something I didn't know;
that leads me to believe that this ceo should know the same stuff that
the Intel ceo knows (I think he also has a pretty big ego)."
Please let me set the record straight on what I said. Intel's founders (Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove - actually Andy is Employee No. 1) came from Fairchild as did Jerry Sanders, the founder of AMD. And yes, I distinctly said he has a huge ego.
Jerry Sanders was a salesman at Fairchild, and a great one from what I have read.
However, Intel's founders were all technical experts. Bob Noyce invented something - THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT. Not too shabby a technical accomplishment. Gordon Moore was the Vice President of Research And Development at Fairchild.
Andy Grove was a senior Research Engineer who performed some of the basic early fundamental studies on MOS devices, laying the foundation for virtually all integrated circuits that we know today. He published an excellent textbook on these subjects in 1967 entitled "The Physics And Technology Of Semiconductor Devices".
My point was and is this:
Intel's market dominance stems from it's highly innovative technical achievements, such as the INVENTION of the microcomputer (1971) and the EPROM (1971), as well as design, development and marketing of the first MOS DRAM (1969) and SRAM circuits(1972).
Their success is well deserved. Recently, their marketing prowess seems to have eclipsed what Jerry Sanders could only dream about.
The AMD - Intel relationship has spawned much controversy in the recent past. Visualize this, if you will, as a horse race. One of these contenders is a thoroughbread. Which one would you bet on for the long haul?
To address the issue of why I feel this way. Either you didn't bother to read my prior posts on this subject or your memory is somewhat shortsited.
Please recall what I mentioned about Jerry Sanders' use of a personal limousine and chauffeur (full time) provided by AMD's shareholders, his purchase of MMI 1987) for $350,000,000 and their leadership technology that he let slide into a third rate competitor in the PLD market.
More recently, he has misled investors regrading AMDs ability to design and market and produce devices competitive with Intel in the time frame that he said he would. To grasp at a "corrective straw", he threw in the towel (late last year) on designing competitive x86 circuits and forked over $600 - $800 million for NexGEN in order to buy his way back into the x86 market. Millions of dollars of x86 internal development (K5/K6) were simply tossed into the scrap heap, once again with shareholders taking the hit.
Does that refresh your memory, or need I elaborate some more?
Paul |
