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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GlobalMarine who wrote (80602)	11/20/1999 10:34:00 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 1572719

Hi Rand; Thanks for responding to my post that eventually, the motherboards will include the disk drive. It is true that the HD is mechanical, and that it currently is separate from the MB in form and function. But this is true for a lot of stuff that is now on the MB. If you look at a hard disk, you will find a printed circuit board. There is no inherent requirement for the components on that PCB to be placed on a board different from the MB. The reason that they are separate now is that it is currently cheaper that way. I expect it to remain cheaper that way for at least 5 years, and maybe 10 or 20. But eventually, all the components get stuffed onto just one board. The calculator industry went through similar contortions, with the earlier models having multiple PCBs. Separate PCBs have to be connected with cables, and those cables mean higher costs, extra components, more weight and size, more power consumption, and more frequent field failures. But having a disk drive as a separate unit is convenient, in that you can customize the computer. This is always an advantage, but eventually the advantage of complete integration wins out, as it has so many times in the past. For instance, there was a time when CPUs were shipped with separate chips for the ALU from the memory. That allowed the "box maker" to customize the machine. But the cost and speed advantage of putting it all on one chip made microprocessors an obvious winner. Most of us can remember a time when floating point units were separate from the CPU, for instance. Other things in computers, especially the cheaper ones, that used to be separate boards but are now on the MB are, for example, graphics boards, sound cards, net connection boards, memory boards and I/O boards. All of these have been sucked onto low end mother boards. An important thing to note is that separate components are almost always first integrated at the low end of the computer market, and only later at the upper end. Thus low end CPUs had integrated cache before high end ones. So we should look at the low end to see where the box making industry as a whole is going. Where I see it going, is more standardized machines, with fewer choices for the box maker. And I think that will not be good for DELL in the long run. I don't have a feeling for how AMD will do with this. They need to move towards SOC type stuff if they want to remain viable. I really don't know if they are going that way. But I get the impression (maybe wrong) that flash provides them with a bit of a connection. -- Carl