Friday, September 10, 2004
Computers that are faster, cheaper, louder, less filling, with extra whitening, and leave you with better breath
Intel announces it's dual-core plan, and an ambitious plan to halve power consumption for its laptop chips, with a completely un-ambitious plan to do it by 2010.- Dear Intel - few except gamers want a power-guzzling, fan filled, uber-fast home computer, they just want one that's good enough. Think of your current product plans as the 1970s model american automobile - before massive inflation, a defense buildup, and an oil shortage. If you don't find a killer post-multi-media software application worth driving your cpu chips into the home, your revenues will continue to decline.
In the multi-media PC, you're just imitating Via's growth market, and you still haven't figured out that your component (the cpu and motherboard chipset) is the only part of the system whose cost seems likely to decline.
Also: Worrying note for you - Remember RISC? See all the arm and mips and competing x86-clone cpus going into embedded devices all around you - it's baaaaack. If you stuck floating point in a shipping arm cpu, you will cannibalize sales from the x86 - but solve your power management problems long before 2010.
Ericson drops bluetooth, signifying mostly that bluetooth's life will be long, but stuck in the IR and wireless handset replacement market....
while the big handset and wifi providers get behind wifi - signifying the slow squeezeout of independent wifi operators similar to what happened in the ISP market post-AOLhell (1995)
DirectTV plans an ambitious launch schedule to expand HDTV broadcast capability. No sign of what kind of launch vehicle they intend to use. But speaking of that...
¶ 5:14 PM
