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Technology Stocks : IDTI - an IC Play on Growth Markets -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (9093)	7/6/1998 8:52:00 PM
From: wmf	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11555

Scumbria, I know that National is trying to do that. But that is still some ways off. And it remains to be shown if it really is cheaper to do everything on one chip: yield might be the big big issue. If one particle destroys your memory array on the integrated chip your perfectly good CPU right next to it will be gone, too !!!!! So I really do not think that this is the threat for IDTI.

To: Scumbria who wrote (9093)	7/6/1998 9:03:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11555

Sounds like a good argument. The problem is that it hasn't worked that well for Cyrix/NSM so far. Although Cyrix pioneered the MediaGX part, they failed to make any money on them. Compaq, their lead OEM, has gone away as a major customer for the GX despite what would appear to be a market advantage. The parts are a round peg in a square whole (motherboard socket) that few customers have rallied around. Now National wants is designing SOCs that are supposed to capture the market by storm; "IF" the market goes along with a proprietary solution, and "IF" the market is satisfied with whatever relatively fixed set of features NSM is able to design into the parts. Meanwhile the jugernaut PC industry is quickly evolving on many fronts simultaneously at such a break-neck pace that no SOC solution, no matter how clever, will be right for the majority of them. The greatest evolution is taking place in graphics and DSP functions which aren't easily frozen into a systems on a chip solution. Around the middle of next year we may find that NSM has a winner for the "internet appliance" market but they are unlikely to pose that much of a threat for the mainstream PC market. IDTI has their own integrated chip roadmap that may prove to be more flexible than the approach taken by NSM. At any rate, why talk about things that are several quarters out on the horizon as if it were a current reality and problem?