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Technology Stocks : LSI Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: shane forbes who wrote (13014)	6/12/1998 9:28:00 PM
From: shane forbes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

(continuing) Let's see the reasons given for LSI's downfall: (1) LSI is a DRAM producer - the magical MU link - hilarious now, stupid now, but well accepted even indirectly in 1996 - the magical MU LSI share price link, heck even the WSJ interactive had to print a retraction that suggested LSI was a DRAM company a few months ago... (2) Korea converting fabs - HA! - Korea almost bankrupt now (3) everyone is converting to logic - logic is a billion things to a million different uses - a converter is a logic device, so is a modem chipset, so is a smart card chip, so is an Auto chip, so is a 10,000 gate ASIC - but show me how many of these converted fabs are doing designs with average gate counts of 500-600,000 gates and I'll show you a grand total of one company based in Milipitas. (4) Toshiba winning the PlayStation design - 1 year later and we are still waiting on news from Toshiba about this impending design win... (5) DVD will never sell - the naysayers were right on this one at least for a long while but the PC market is set and the DVD player market is coming along (very slowly). LSI does both. (5) some mystical new oxy device will be the end of DVD - yup and in the meantime DVD will have an installed base of well over 2-300 million drives. (6) LSI's camera chip sucks Just plain wrong - enough of design wins to disprove this - enough of resolution to disprove this. (7) Insider sales Look at your favorite tech and show me a lack of insider sales and I'll show you matching snow flakes (esp. the big techs). Besides Moshe Garielov left the company. *Even better count the big semis with recent insider purchases* ...** (8) ad infinitum... Like I said same old same old same old story... all imagined... all disproved wrong... Mother Hubbard is consistently batting goose eggs... Shane.

To: shane forbes who wrote (13014)	6/13/1998 12:56:00 PM
From: SidStock	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

(ibm) Doing some digging on the issue of how does IBM stack up against LSI. From a business point of view, its hard to get IBM's numbers for their microelectonics, so revenue is unknown. LSI's are readily available... IBM does state they are currently doing 75 design projects using +1M gate asics. Dataquest estimates them doing 115 designs this year. Again not sure how this stacks to lsi design starts... Mentioned in the 10K, it is also a lower margin biz vs their system & storage products (which seems reasonable). A revenue increase last year of 22.9% in OEM (ASIC, DRAM, HDD) didnt seem to have much positive effect on their overall h/w sales. It would seem ASIC is the smallest contributor to OEM sales. One of the reasons, IBM has a disadvantage, is that it uses its own chips internally (ala systems, workstation (PowerPC), etc...)to compete with propective customers of their asic biz. Thus if Sun where to use IBM to supply it chips, Sun is funding/offsetting the cost for IBM to further develop the PowerPC to compete against Sun in the workstation biz. Also, you have to look at distribution, marketing, sales, etc... This is what LSI does for cash.... This is not ibm's main thrust. If ibm went into tough times, they would cut this part of the distribution in a heart beat, before touching their systems sales. On technology and IP, IBM does seem to compete well with LSI. Both LSI & IBM offer the hot ARM core processor. LSI also has the MIPS line of risc cores, and IBM the PowerPC cores. I think the mips core is doing well, and is prefered over the powerpc. The mips processor has been used pretty extensively in workstations (SGI, NEC, ..), its also been used in the networking & telecom (Siemens for one). Of course apple/ibm use the powerpc. DSPs are hot, and both IBM and LSI have offerings... the ti chip is the hottest, and if ibm has truely cloned it, they may have a technlogy advantage here. Here is some reference pages... eetimes.com techweb.com chips.ibm.com I will do some more research next week at the design automation conference. both lsi and ibm asic along with the rest of the group will be there. See what their marketing hype is... should have some good success stories to share... Sid