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 : PC Sector Round Table -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pierre-X who wrote (823)	9/9/1998 8:44:00 AM
From: Pierre-X	Respond to of 2025

Compaq, IBM, HP hop on bus spec By Michael Kanellos news.com The new PCI-X specification would quadruple the speed of the system bus--or the data path between the processor and the rest of the computer--to 133 MHz. ... according to Peter Glaskowsky, an analyst with MicroDesign Resources. "Intel is late in getting a successor to the PCI bus. It is almost full and they need to introduce something fast," he said. "The bottleneck right now is the system bus." ... IBM, for instance, tried to popularize a technology they called Micro Channel in the early 90s. Micro Channel came with royalty fees and it failed. ... "If Intel is thinking of doing something proprietary, the effort is doomed," he said. ... The Intel spokesman added that the company often provides technological standards free of charge to gain industry acceptance. Intel, for example, gives the intellectual property underlying the AGP ... royalty-free to vendors. 133Mhz PCI would certainly be very nice. There are clearly many devices, especially in high-duty servers and some PC workstations that are bottlenecking at the bus ... graphics and storage are the primary culprits, naturally. Note that the implication is that Microchannel failed because of the royalties. Ummmm, no. My recollection is that Microchannel failed for a number of reasons, and the significance of the role licensing fees played in that failure is not obvious. I think the generally accepted history is that MC was hobbled by lack of backward compatability. Remember MC was competing against EISA, and some you may remember how ridiculously expensive THAT bus was. He did miss the better example of death-by-royalty: Token-ring. I'd say it's pretty clear that the Token-Ring/Ethernet War was decided by the Royalty Angle. Oops, IBM was holding the bag on that one too--poor IBM. They just can't seem to get an architecture break... Note the further silly conclusion implied in the article that, since Microchannel failed, Intel had better not pursue any similiar strategies. You have to look out for this news.com reporter Michael Kanellos, he's written some silly stuff in the past. He does okay when he sticks to quoting "experts" (who often say silly stuff as well <g>) but the parts that he writes himself ... I think Intel is in a great position to grasp the technological reins and establish a chokehold on certain aspects of PC technology that can be leveraged into long term economic profit, just like a well-known big-company-whose-name-starts-with-'M' has a chokehold on the OS. Not that I'm endorsing such an action, merely pointing out that such a strategy would make more sense for Intel today than it did for IBM 6 years ago. I like the spin Intel puts on their oh-so-generous-and-holy "donation" of AGP technology to the PC public. Ha! AGP is/was a thinly disguised ploy to push people to upgrade their CPUs. And it worked too. <g>