Hi Meathead; About those workstations, and ASPs.
I am in complete agreement regarding Wintel getting
the workstation market. I've been expecting this for
10 years, my only surprise is that it has taken so long.
Every time I have to work on a Unix box it takes me
a couple days to relearn all the stupid commands.
The operating systems are now point and click, but
you always end up having to write little chunks of
"batch" code to generate test vectors, or whatever.
I got sent down to SI valley 18 months ago to get a
chip development office running. We needed work
stations to do some number crunching. After some
experimentation, it turned out that our problem was
dependent only on CPU clock speed and memory
bandwidth. The hard drive wasn't being used much,
and adding memory didn't speed anything up. So
I went over to Frye's and bought the parts for a
couple bare-bones 200MHz systems. The problem
at hand was routing of FPGAs using Xilinx software.
My ex's home computer finally got replaced last week.
A $500 system (kept old monitor and printer) was all it
took. My view on corporate is that they are now
beginning to reduce costs on the kind of computer they
supply to the employees. I'll ask my buddy in IS about
that....
Back in 1986 I had a job designing for a mini-super
computer CPU. (I did the floating point arithmetic on a
CRAY clone at SCS.) As engineers, we could see
technology reducing the cost of making mini-supers
as integration allowed putting a larger and larger
system onto a chip. The problem we saw was that
the ASP on mini-super computers was starting to go
down. We knew that the market for them was not
increasing sales enough to counteract the reduced
ASPs. So I bailed out of the industry while it was still
easy. Sure enough the reduction in ASPs heralded
the destruction of the industry.
By the way, the workstation we used was a Unix
box, based on the Fairchild "Clipper" processor,
since defunct. The company that made the box
was Intergraph. Workstation makers back then
carried high P/Es cause they could sell at very
high margins. You think DELL has high margins,
they are nothing compared to what proprietary
hardware commands.
But Wintel workstations are going to be sold as a
commodity at low markup. No one has a permanent
advantage, so the companies deserve low P/Es,
especially when E's are at historically high levels.
-- Carl |
