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

To: Paul Engel who wrote (47361)	1/26/1999 1:29:00 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580052

Paul, And the complexity and SHORT LIFE SPAN of a graphics chip, coupled with the "consumer price points" means SLIM to NONE in the margins/profits department The professional graphics market, which Lawrence was referring to, has quite nice margins. Those same cheap transistors, which are used to put pointlessly large L2 caches on Intel desktop processors, can be used much more efficiently in a graphics design. Scumbria

To: Paul Engel who wrote (47361)	1/26/1999 5:34:00 AM
From: PFRice	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580052

Someone once described the graphics industry in the following way. Picture a bunch of vendors sitting around a lazy susan. On the lazy susan there is a really big mallet. Once a year the lazy susan is spun and the vendor who ends up with the mallet in front of them gets to take that mallet and beat the others vendors on the head with it for the next 12 months. S3 use to be the one dishing it out, but then as you pointed out they missed a design cycle and the mallet was passed to Nvidia and then ATI. The (consumer) graphics industry is unforgiving and extremely competitive. The simple fact is, the players have no choice but to remain on the cutting edge. There will certainly be some players who will succumb to the hazards you describe, but that is not going to stop the industry from pushing the technology. And along the way, it looks like the cpu vendors are going to get caught in the crossfire. BTW, here's a press release covering S3's first silicon at .18 micron: s3.com And here's a good article on the topic: techweb.com