Jock, from what I have heard about VLSI, you wouldn't want LSI to merge with them. That (what I have heard) applies both to management and engineering. Except for the grousing around here about Wilf, I haven't heard similar stuff about LSI. OK, so why was VLSI up 1 3/8 today?
In a previous post, you expressed disappointment about LSI's R&D being cut (maybe result when Symbios was factored in) to, what, 15%? 15% R&D, expressed as a percentage of revenues, is still very high. If anything, as a stockholder, I would applaud getting R&D costs down some. FWIW, Intel has been at between 9 and 10% for their last two quarters. Their finance page:
intc.com
If you have to be way above the market leader, you'll always have an albatross hanging around your neck, won't you? Oh, BTW, my salary comes out of R&D, so I wouldn't be one to want to willy-nilly cut it in the budget. So, one of Symbios' product lines doesn't require much R&D, so maybe it helps lower that expenditure. It's a disk array, or what we call a "herd of disks". They are really just a rack and stack of hard drives, controller and power supply, but they sell very well as RAID building blocks. So, all high tech products aren't intense R&D spenders.
As for LSI, and whether it is a viable long term investment at all, I have to be thinking of whether the paradigm may be shifting back, away from ASICs or SOC's, to microprocessors again, either embedded or discrete x86. AMD recently got a design win from Sun for a PC-in-Sun-workstation thing. The building block is going to be K6/2 (I think) chips, not any SOC or PCOAC. Whether there is any paradigm shift, and I do believe it's happening, Intel will be a better investment than LSI anyway. What system vendor wants to screw with a custom, one of a kind thing like a SOC, if an x86 MPU, which practically everybody technical has experience with, can be used. One more nail in the coffin, but what do I know?
Tony |
