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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC)

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Nov 25 3:59 PM EST

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To: K. M. Strickler who wrote (47952)	2/17/1998 4:23:00 PM
From: Jeff Fox	Read Replies (1) of 186894

K.M. re: OT - daughtercards Actually your suggestions have merit and have and will be seriously considered. In fact original small systems were configured just this way. The "motherboard" was a passive backplane board. The CPU was on a card that plugged into the backplane. The IO controllers were on another card and memory on yet another. The Intel "Multibus" was one example of such a system. Problems developed. The most serious were electrical problems over the connectors. With so many connectors and the resulting long signal paths noise and reflections are serious problems. The cures were lots of resistors which contributed cost and consumed lots of power. It is a hard fact that components on a board separated by mere inches are much cleaner and thus faster and lower power. Secondly was reliability. Soldered components can be tested as one and assured to be of quality in the factory. The backplane systems were notoriously unreliable due to signal quality issues. Finally is cost, by far the most important issue. It has become a fact that components are often cheaper than connectors! Each system connector adds significant cost and really offers little to zero system value. Now that all the "super IO" functions fit in one part these functions are now much cheaper than backplane connectors. The PC industry can offer these functions on a motherboard for nearly free. This wouldn't be true if they are segmented off to daughter cards. Take a serial port card for instance. You'll find in the stores that these cards are the same price as multi function IO cards. It cost no more to provide a bundle than to provide only one function. Then if you check the cost structure for these cards you will find that the marketing cost greatly exceeds the component cost. Same is true for motherboard manufactures. The big cost is in modularity after stuff becomes a commodity. Jeff

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