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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ali Chen who wrote (44126)	12/28/1998 11:22:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 1573433

Ali, Yes there are those 'Joe Clono' shops that sell the el-cheapo boards. They know what they are doing: looking for suckers. In essence those who are able to see Tomshardware have armor against those shops. The person who is not tech-capable enough may well be better off with compaq. Dell and CPQ(and their running mates) use proprietary cases, power supplies and motherboards to defeat any degree of customer mobility via board change/repairs/upgrades, it makes repairs to power supplies as expensive as a small used car, and so on. They are against and kind of standards.There is a standard and it is growing as the junko stuff gets weeded out by failures and returns. Recently the Toronto wholesalers all sell good quality power supplies as they must conform to the UL/CSA certification. All power supplies sold in Ontario must meet this certification and apart from fake labels this has driven them totally from the market as inspectors go around siezing entire computers if they lack that label as well as taking all loose power supplies that lack them. Toronto has possibly Canadas largest Chinese community with Vancouver second/first? and as a result has a huge number of importers who bring in 30-40 containers per month of all manner of goods from China etc. These big players want good stock and zero returns and enforce this need on all the suppliers. The 'skin the client' mentality has nearly gone. All the shops here know all about over clocking and sell boards that do it as well as good ball bearing fan kits that do not fail. As to the $100 floor on mobos, have you ever done a part count and costed out a mobo?. From what I see the chip set is the major cost and all the other parts are standard. The chip set maker provides a basic schematic and preferred layout and the mobo makers use that as a start point. This means there will be an asymptotic convergence towards the same cost as the assordid makers converge on it. Their only way to cut price is to cut costs via parts substitution, and it they go too far they get failures. I would suspect that another mechanism will also occur, lower performance/buggy chip sets will sell for less and some will buy them and make mobos for sale at a lower price(TX-PRO, PC Partner, etc) As each component bottoms out in price we end up at the $100 mobo. We are at the end stage of this now and the only path for less money is cheaper chip sets and cheaper processors. memory, DIMM sockets, parts are plateaued and are even starting to increase slightly with inflation. Copper and steel are at historic low prices and if copper goes back to $1.50 and steel goes up by $100/ton and oil goes up by $5 per barrel then the declines in cases, power supplies,keyboards will stop and reverse. the path now is to put more capability into the chip itself to the point that a chip set is no longer needed(possible??) and NSM is on this path with the video in the chip. They will also throw away expansion capability and make them like imacs. You could make a PC in Imac form for $500. The other problem is the steady increase in the OS over time. 5 years ago the OEMS paid $25 for Win3.1 and their systems sold for $5000 + Now we have a situation where the OS can be 15-20% of the system cost as the price falls.. This latest Intel "signature" concept is like the Microchannel thing, it will fail unless it is open and royalty free. Software makers want it to stop piracy, we will all get unique keyed software. We are at the point where major products can have individual CDs made by writers for your signature only. Big companies will do it as they want no other stuff on their machines and they do not want their stuff taken home. We will all suffer and it could lead to a two tier system with Intel systems and AMD/NSM/ETC systems. If MSFT goes along with it and makes the next windows only for that it will be a choke point and only Intel will pass it. It will require MSFT connivance as well as acceptance by many software authors and it will be such a choke point that I feel it will not fly. SOme will get on board and make two versions? Remember the Microchannel? and how most who went along with it died, IBM had a near death experience. If Intel does this they may well be humbled. Bill