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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (9008)	11/7/2002 9:04:39 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

With new product, AMD takes on heavyweights in wireless chip market Analyst Greg Quick the451 Sector Storage & Systems Report date Mon, 4 Nov 2002 Advanced Micro Devices has started sampling its wireless chipset, the Am1772 Wireless LAN product, which the company is pairing with a mini-PCI card reference design. Final products are due in the first quarter of 2003. The new offering, based on the technology AMD gained when it acquired Alchemy last summer, means AMD will beat Intel to market with a 802.11b product that its customers can use in designs for notebooks and other portable products. Impact assessment The message AMD has leveraged its investment in Alchemy with a new technology that has the potential to bring additional revenue streams to the company – something that is very important right now. Competitive landscape Intel has said it is working on a dual-band 802.11a/b product, and there are a number of other players – including Texas Instruments, Intersil and Atheros Communications – that are developing 802.11 chipsets as well. The451 assessment This move is good for AMD on many levels: it stands to make its portable products more competitive, it opens new markets for the company, and it shows that its investment in Alchemy was a sound one. Context - The 802.11 wireless chipset market is a highly competitive field with a large number of players and growing interest from consumers to corporations. Intel recently pledged $150m in investment from its Communications Fund to help jump-start companies developing the infrastructure for this market. AMD had been seeking to get back into the portable embedded and wireless processor business when it purchased Alchemy Semiconductor for an undisclosed sum in February 2002. It had departed this market a few years back when it sold off its AM29000 RISC-based offerings to focus on its core business – microprocessors – which was not prospering at the time. At the time of its purchase, Alchemy's main products were the Au1000 and the Au1500, both based on the MIPS32 architecture. The Au1000 has been around for over a year and has about 15 design wins. The Au1500 was introduced late last year as a more powerful and flexible processor capable of running at a number of different speeds, with each using a different amount of voltage. Last month, AMD said it would start marketing a range of products under the Alchemy Solutions brand name, including microprocessor cores, wireless chipsets, reference designs and development boards. Technology - The Am1772 is a two-chip CMOS-based product that features both a baseband processor and a media access controller along with a direct memory access (DMA) host interface. The product includes the Am1772 chipset, which comprises the Am1770 radio frequency transceiver and the Am1771 baseband processor and MAC. The Am1770 transceiver utilizes direct-down conversion, which eliminates the requirement for an intermediate frequency chip. Strategy - AMD has big plans in this area. The company says this is just its first step into the wireless market and that it has several more products on the board for the next 12 months. AMD is also working to integrate the wireless chip technology with its MIPS-based cores for complete system-on-a-chip products. Competition - Intel has said it plans to build a chipset that supports both 802.11a and 802.11b, so that legacy networks will still be supported. The first chipset is expected to ship in conjunction with a new generation of mobile microprocessors code-named Banias, due sometime in 2003. Intersil and Atheros are the leaders in this market segment, which while still relatively small, is expected to undergo tremendous growth in the next few years. There has been a great deal of activity in this segment in the past year. Among the more recent moves in the area are RF Micro Devices purchasing Resonext Communications for $133m and Agere Systems and Infineon agreeing to work together to develop chipsets.

To: TigerPaw who wrote (9008)	11/7/2002 9:08:06 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Electoral watershed America's election results affect us all Leader Thursday November 7, 2002 The Guardian An opinion poll taken across America just before this week's mid-term elections found US voters split down the middle between Republicans and Democrats. The voters are almost as equally divided on whether their country is heading in the right direction or not. The poll confirms that there are two Americas today - Americas with different values and priorities - just as there were two Americas in the presidential vote in November 2000. In Tuesday's elections, however, there was only one winner - President George Bush's Republican party. Once again, US voters confounded Washington's often useless punditocracy, who had predicted big Democratic gains at state level and no change in the split control of Congress. True, the Democrats won some important governors' races - a significant descant to the night's losses elsewhere. But they lost Georgia to the Republicans (for the first time since 1872), failed to hold Maryland for the first time since Spiro Agnew, and fell well short of unseating Jeb Bush in the night's big grudge contest in Florida. In the battle for Congress, though, the Republicans scored triumph after triumph, extending their hold in the House, and winning all of the most keenly contested Senate races bar one. As a result, Mr Bush's first term, which began in such controversy, has now been massively secured. A presidency which once faced unprecedented challenges of legitimacy, has now won a political lock on the Congress such as few Republican leaders have ever enjoyed. The implications are vast, both at home and abroad, and anyone who ever pretended that the two parties are indistinguishable is about to receive a cruel lesson in political reality. Carried on a wave of post 9/11 patriotic approval, Mr Bush took on his demoralised opponents with total ruthlessness. He out-fundraised, out-spent, out-campaigned and out-worked the Democrats. His reward is a position from which he will launch a fresh round of tax cuts for the rich and welfare cuts for the poor, from which he will dismantle key parts of the federal government in favour of the states and corporations, and, most important of the lot, from which he will now make a raft of conservative judicial appointments, aimed at shifting power in America's courts conclusively to the right for decades to come. Like Mrs Thatcher after the Falklands, Bush has won a war election. The one in six of Americans who actually voted for his party gave him everything of which he could have dreamed. Whether they will again feel as generous to Mr Bush in 2004 will depend on the economy and on whether Democrats can hammer out the alternative strategy they so lamentably lacked this time. Americans have made a fateful choice this week. Both they and the world will have to live - or in some cases die - with the consequences. guardian.co.uk