Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bythepark who wrote (6083)	8/15/1999 1:08:00 PM
From: Chinacat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

The Nihon Motorola strategy is an interesting one. M-Core could have have been the ARM of the embedded world. Instead Motorola confused the market by offering 68k, PowerPC, ColdFire and M-Core. A totally fragmented and unstrategic product mix, with no clear linkage and transitional direction between product lines. Now, the "last chance" for the M-Core is in the "open source" royalty free approach. The most important questions: 1. How does Motorola expect to make money? 2. If they expect to earn money as a "foundry service" by providing customers the manufacturing capabilities based on the M-Core designs, do they have a competitive pricing structure to compete against TSMC, UMC, etc? 3. If they will allow customers to take the M-core based designs to other foundries for mass-production, will they charge license fees on peripheral IPs to make money? A lot remains to be seen. ARM charges $1m to $5m, from what I've heard, for the use of the ARM core. In turn, ARM licensees crank out great chips (small foot-print, low power consumption, tight code size, etc) at competitive prices. Can Motorola woo Japanese silicon and system-on-a-chip companies away from ARM and propetary Japanese silicon (Hitachi's SH, Mitsubishi's M-32, Fujitsu's FR series, etc)? As one with roots in the RTOS business (disclosure: I ran Wind's Japan operations till May 1998) and as one who is now in the Silicon IP business (I now run Japan for a start-up that sells 1394, USB, and other types of Silicon IP and SOC solutions), Motorola's newest gameplan is one that is really interesting, and the "ultimate experiment" in the future possibilities of Microprocessor vendors. Sincerely appreciate to hear from all on this latest Mot's move... cheers!