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Technology Stocks : COMS & the Ghost of USRX w/ other STUFF -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeffery E. Forrest who wrote (9226)	11/14/1997 12:47:00 PM
From: jhild	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22053

The articles on 56K are pretty informative, Jeff. Thanks. I am amazed at the number of HSP (Host Signal Processing?) based modems shipped (2M from PC-Tel). Coupling the CPU into the modem technology just seems lame brained. With such fundamental shifts going on in this area, it seems that the half life of current 56K modem technology, is shorter than the half life of whatever cpu purchase most people will make. Not to mention the 10-25% penalty on cpu performance. Here I am anxiously awaiting cable modem availability, while at the same time thinking that my once state of the art 133mhz Pentium, over 2 years old now, is not as speedy as I could use. Say I get a 266mhz P II, why would I want to throw away even 10% of my performance to save less than 10% of my purchase price? There is no discussion of the impact of greater than 56k throughput for HSP based solutions. So if a cable modem implementation is 10 -20 times faster than 56K, clearly they can't be using 10 to 20 times more cpu, because that would be all the cpu. But it is sure to be a much bigger percentage, if it even works at all. Therefore, I would see myself with an external or separate internal as soon as I switch. And if I had an HSP implementation on my motherboard as Intel seems to be talking about, I would be paying for chips that I no longer had any use for. (Maybe this is Intel's thinking. As cpu's get ever more powerful, reasons to upgrade diminish. So like car manufacturers in the fifties putting fins on this years models, they want to obsolete their computers, to spur continued repurchases.) That's why I think the COMS story is still in tact. So long as the technologies are in flux and connections are available at ever increasing performance levels such as 56k, ISDN, DSL, xDSL, ASDL, etc. - the modem/interface card function will need to be modular. But imo once things stabalize (if ever), then watch out. INTC will be able to just integrate the he-double-L out of everything. But that seems a long way off.