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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TREND1 who wrote (68782)	10/7/1999 1:12:00 PM
From: benwood	Respond to of 132070

Larry, Don't know the answer to that one, but I probably would if I were a hardware engineer instead of software & systems. What I do know is that in the engineering world, time lost can be opportunity lost. I know many examples of delays which killed off a technology because someone came along with a better idea, or because improvements in the old products proved to be cheaper and/or they hit a critical mass. My feeling is that since a transition period is arriving, that we will see several competing designs for a while: DDR, PC133, PC166, PC200, Rambus, ???. I'd certainly keep my eye on what nVidia and 3dfx do in the 3D video arena for clues about who's going to win. One possible historical parallel is when the PC bus (ISA) became the bottleneck, a shift to PCI occurred. However, that shift was preceeded by about 1 year by a shift to the VESA Local bus. The reason VL-bus had such a short life is that it didn't have the long term growth potential (in performance and capabilities) that PCI had. Incidentally, Intel designed and strongly backed the PCI, but released it royalty-free. A royalty-fee-based follow-on to the ISA called MCA was licensed for a relatively high fee (5% of system cost) by IBM and failed spectacularly.