Ted,
Yes I saw the comments from Breifing.. the thing that annoys me is that people don't see the long-term implications of this.
Here are a couple of negatives:
The CPU cores for the PCOAC ideas all trickled down from the Cyrix stand alone cores. So NSM either has to keep the Cyrix designers (very hard to do in light of the recent announcement), or lose future core generations to further delays as employees leave.
If they want to keep designing cores, even with new people, the R&D overhead will be just as big, so there is no cost savings here.
They are trying to sell their fab plant. Without even arguing the cost savings of building the silicon yourself vs. contracting it out on a per wafer basis, there are several other KEY problems. One, owning your own fab, you can turn test wafers MUCH faster than these contract joints will. Two, you have control over the process specs, something you don't have if someone else owns the fab. Three, you can change masks, etc. without the usual costs associated with doing so at a contract fab (most fabs charge you a nice premium when you want to start a new set of masks).
While this move may be good short-term for National's stock price and Halla's job security (this should get him another 3 months), in the long term, NSM has killed any chance they had of doing something useful, and have wasted 1.5 years in the mean time. Complete and total waste to me. If NSM was smart they would put the whole damned company up for sale.
Regards,
Steve |
