Those of you who are familiar with what I usually post might be a little disappointed with what you are about to read here. After you read this post you aren't going to know how to squeeze any more FPS out of your system when over that smoking field.
I just felt like putting into writing what I've been thinking about for the past few months. Please keep in mind that all of what you are about to read are simply my opinions. I'm not directly affiliated with any of the companies I'm about to comment on.
I'd like to hear what the rest of you are thinking. Please feel free to post whatever you'd like. (In other words, call me a moron if you really want to... hehe. )
This post definately isn't going to win any literary awards either. (It seems like the better I get in math, the worse my spelling and grammar get.
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Since I don't have the time to really spend writing this that I'd like to have, I'm just going to list a bunch of companies and what I think of what they seem to be doing recently.
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First off, Hewlett Packard: I'm sure a lot of you know that the big HP-Compaq deal went through. (Or maybe you don't, it sure hasn't got the media coverage it deserves.) Back when the company was still run by Hewlett and Packard, HP was known for innovation, risk taking, and quality products. If you saw the HP logo on a piece of equipment you knew it was good. HP hired the best and brightest engineers around and gave them the freedom and financial support to do as they saw fit. The engineers had access to the top levels of the company itself. It was a company based on engineering and run by engineers. Late in his career Hewlett gave a speech in which he outlined his guidelines for how the company should operate. Those simple guidelines are familiar to many in engineering and business and were widely copied by nearly every other tech company. HP broke all records for growth and profits rose every year.
How things have changed. HP today is just a shadow of the company it used to be. Innovation doesn't even seem to be in their vocabulary anymore. Instead of "invent", their slogan ought to say "copy as cheaply as we can, and if we can't copy it, buy it cheap and put our name on it." About the only profitable division left at HP is their printer division. That's the one part of HP that is allowed to continue to do what H & P founded the company to do. HP computers and peripherals, which used to be a cut above the rest in both quality and performance (and price
), are now IMO the computer equivilant of the Yugo. Many of you probably don't know that HP CD burners are not made by HP, but contracted to the lowest bidder. (Sony made a bunch of them.) Much of HP's printer division is based here in Corvallis, Oregon. None of the engineers or managers that I know who work at HP wanted the merger to go through. The sons of both Hewlett and Packard also opposed the merger. That tells you something. An informal survey of HP employees showed that 2/3 to 3/4 of them opposed the merger. I'd say the true percentage was closer to 90%. I've had 4 former HP employees (and one HP spinoff company employee) as instructors for classes I've taken here at OSU. Many of them have told me that "when H & P still roamed the halls" this never would have happened. A few of them left the company because they didn't like the way things were going. Any company that doesn't take advise from it's own employees seriously and kicks the son of their own founder off it's board is bound for disaster. The negative press that HP is going to get when they lay off 10 - 20 THOUSAND employees is not going to help them in their cause either. I personally would not be surprised if within 5 years it will be HP's turn in bankruptcy court. That's truely a shame.
Intel: I know of very few companies that push their engineers to innovate quite as hard as Intel does. Nearly everyone that works at Intel that I've spoken to over the years love (loved) working there. (Maybe too hard, a couple of the former Intel engineers I've spoken to left the company because they worked themselves to the point of burn out.) Intel knows their market like no other company and spends the time and money in testing and design to make sure their products work right when they are released to the public. Even though I personally feel the P4 suffers from some design faults, I would be a fool to say that Intel won't turn a profit from it. Intel engineers definately didn't just set out to improve upon the already excellent P6 (Pentium Pro, P2, P3, Celeron) design, which certainly would have been the easy and obvious way to go about designing a new processor. Although the original Pentium 4 design doesn't quite live up to my expectations, it's largely because it would have just been too expensive to produce as the engineers originally designed it. Intel made some pretty serious cost minimizing cuts, which unfortunately crippled the performance of the original "Willamette" P4 core. The new "Northwood" core is improved and it's performance is finally what I'd expect from a CPU carrying the Intel name. As the cost of producing the P4 contines to drop (and it will take a BIG drop in the next month or so with the move to 12" [300mm] wafers ), engineers can finally implement the P4 as it was originally designed (mainly they need fix the anemic floating point unit the current design is stuck with, if they can learn anything from the Athlon design it should be that a powerful FPU makes a big difference). Intel also spends a LOT of money on research and development and definately isn't afraid to take risks. (Hi AKDejaVu
) In many ways, Intel has become the company HP used to be. (Not that all their new projects bear fruit, case and point being the current Itanium design, but hey, the "new" HP did much of the design on that one...
) It doesn't hurt that Intel's production facilities are at least a full generation ahead of anyone else. If Intel has a weakness it's their strongarm tactics in trying to maintain their monopoly. If they aren't careful they are going to end up like Rambus, all alone with no friends left to play with.
AMD: Talk about a complete turnaround virtually overnight. AMD went from an also-ran in the tech industry to a real innovator that Intel now has to take seriously. In the past AMD was known for their flash memory products, and for their second rate copies of Intel processors. AMD was known for delays and quality problems. That's all changed now. The K6 was AMDs first big success. While it didn't quite live up to expectations in performance and suffered from a real lack of a decent chipset and quality motherboard to support it, it opened the door to economical PCs for virtually everyone. Intel realized they were losing money and for the first time was forced to follow rather than lead by "going cheap" with the Celeron. (Many of you know that Celerons were virtually identical to the Pentium 2, and actually cost nearly as much to produce.) With the release of the Athlon 3 years ago now AMD undoubtedly took the lead for the first time in performance AS WELL AS price. What ensued was a virtual war between AMD and Intel for bragging rights as to who had the fastest x86 CPU in the world. PC sales skyrocketed, while the Mac lost even more market share. For the first time AMD was widely recognized by at least those who were knowledgable in the area as a real contender in the PC CPU market. AMD hasn't let up yet, and has a processor design due at the end of this year that is every bit as revolutionary as the P4, codenamed "SledgeHammer and ClawHammer."
It's hard to predict whether or not AMD will be able to actually turn a profit on it's CPUs. The one area in which they are truely lacking is production capabilities. AMD sells their Athlons for too little money, compared to the performance they offer. I often wonder if this hurts, rather than helps them. Many people still associate AMD with inferior quality products, and the fact that their CPUs are cheaper than equivilant Intel products may actually not be helping them win over users. Their fab plants are also currently not nearly as efficient as Intel. Within the next couple months AMD will be taking a big risk and moving production to using a somewhat unproven SOI techinque.
If it works as designed they will be able to produce extremely fast processors and make inroads into the very high profit workstation market. If it fails AMD's already high costs of production will rise even higher and "Hammer" may be doomed from the start to failure. I personally feel they will succeed, but I do think it's likely that AMD is being too optimistic with its November-December projections for volume production of Hammer. I'm not honestly expecting it until the end of the first quarter next year.
