Tedd,
Of the five video chip makers that I follow for comparison purposes, Cirrus did pretty well today.
1. Trident $17.875 +1.25
2. Cirrus $16.00 +0.625
3. Chps & Tech $18.562 +0.562
4. Tseng $3.875 +0.375
5. S3 $16.375 +0.25
I'd say this is a pretty tight group. The Cirrus price is pretty indicative of the entire Video Chip market. I'd also say that alot of people found Cirrus to be the 2nd best value buy in the group. IMO these numbers give a better reason to like or dislike Cirrus than any other reason I've heard on this thread. No insult intended. I simply mean that today more people "more people = more analysis" thought that Cirrus was a better place to put their money than SIII, CHPS, and TSNG. We are what, maybe 20 or so active.
johnd,
I hope your right about your analysis. If you are I think somewhere in the 2nd quarter Cirrus will really start to shine again.
I did talk to one of my distributors "Dallas" today and she said that they were not filling any large orders for the Laguna as of yet. They sell to two video card and one mother board maker, but they are not buying the chip presently. I'm sure that the really big operations would not go through distys. They would buy direct or go through a rep. She also said that Cirrus would be coming out with a new 3D soon. I've done design work with the older 5424 chip. If you remember it was the middle in a family of 6, priced very competitively, alot of really nice features, ramdac on board, blt burst engine, etc. If Cirrus will take the same approach with their 3D chips they will be winners. I don't know anything about 3D but I read that SIII got in early with a cheapo and locked up the market, built a standard and the rest is current history. If the new SIII 3D chips are dramatically different from their current 3D chips this will open the market and they are doomed. For them to be competitive they're gonna have to be alot different. They'll probably loose the backward compatability and the need for alot of extended features will change the register set dramatically ie: much different programming architecture and pinnout. When this happens Cirrus will kick their butts on hardware features, software ease, and price standpoints. The big boys will also want to work with Cirrus. They've done it before and the engineers know and trust each other, believe me that this makes a huge difference in who gets designed in.
Heres to hoping that everyone makes alot of money long.
DRC |
