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 : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Night Writer who wrote (26945)	6/2/1998 12:53:00 AM
From: ed	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 97611

Night Writer: It is a good article, however the author is just too pessimistic and probably does not have any idea about the computer industry. For one thing, the PC is far from saturation. In the US, PC has penetrate only 40% of the family, and not to mention many families are still owning their 386 systems, and this is based on the assumption that every family has only one PC. What if every family has more than one PCs, like the TVs ? This is just about US, then what about the world market ? To compare the PC with auto is not quite a good comparison. An auto is an auto, just to move a body from point A to point B, the Auto of five years ago is quite similar as what it is now, not too much has been changed, because it is unnecessary. For PC, it is quite different, The PC is driven by application. If there is a new application appear on the horizon which need more powerful of CPU power, the whole industry will be changed overnight. It will make the current PCs obsolete overnight. What will be the next driving force for PC industry ? The answer is Real time video. It means 30 frames per second at least have to be displayed , which means compression and decompression of millions bits of data per second, which also means power of CPUs. Think about that 30 frames of data per second need to be sent through the internet from computer A to computer B, it means wider bandwidth of the net, powerful CPU to compress the data, and sent the compressed data through the internet to another computer, and decompress the data and display the data. What if you need to open up four display windows and display different data sets in real time on all the four display windows in real time (four way communication)? it means even more powerful CPUs. Can you imagine in the future , four people , in Asia, Europe, US, and Africa, held a real time conference on the PCs, just like they are face to face with each other? So, our PC industry is just in its infancy, and it is far from saturation at all. What if CPQ places all its Alpha chip in the PC and sells it as a regular PC in the future, the future PC needs much more CPU powers, it is not just used for word processing. The CPU needs a power of more than 1 giga Hrz per second for video play. As a result of more data being processed per second, we need more memory to store millions of bytes of data (data of video image). Who will be the driving force for the above good things ? Microsoft. Just look at what new features are included in the recently released WIN 98. How about Win 99, 2000 ....etc ? held a real time conference on the computers from all over the