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Issue #153 -- 08/26/2002
Editor: Kevin Krewell, kkrewell@reedbusiness.com
In this issue:
Markus Levy - Senior Editor {08/26/2002}
It hardly needs repeating that these are
tough times for technology companies. We are all concerned for the
companies that have failed or been forced into big layoffs, but
I'm confident the talented people who recently lost jobs will soon
be snapped up by other employers or will become involved in self-initiated
ventures.
We confront an inescapable irony. This is a great time to start
a company, because of abundant professional talent, lower office
rents, and 40-year-low interest rates. Unfortunately, this is also
a time when there is a shortage of venture capital. Not that there
isn't any money, because there is always some money for startups
with a solid fundamental business plan and not just a unique product
idea. But the plan must emphasize tighter financial controls to
keep costs in line, and, perhaps most important, outline a clear
path to profitability.
In addition to the financial challenges associated with forming
a startup company, this recession seems to be emphasizing a return
to the dominance of companies that are larger, better established,
and more highly integrated. Combine this corporate-level consolidation
with the crisis of confidence in accounting practices, and it's
no wonder customers are now more inclined to purchase from larger,
more stable companies that have traditionally held themselves to
higher moral standards. For example, people rarely question the
integrity of AMD, IBM, or Intel, even though some may question their
sales tactics.
This return to traditional operating practices represents a reversal
of the goals during the dot-com bubble era when, too often, pursuing
a quick, lucrative buyout of the new company was emphasized. Not
all individuals involved in startups followed this path; I know
many dedicated professionals who dreamed of building a product and
company that would last. These professionals should not be discouraged,
as dedication and perseverance will eventually bring reward. Furthermore,
despite all the lost value in our capital markets, the talent out
on the streets, and the bad news in corporate financial management,
this may still be the best time to start that company you dream
of or to improve the market position of the one you're struggling
to keep afloat.
Regardless of your position (i.e. within a stable corporation or
a challenging startup), there's no time like the present to think
more about the nature of business ethics. I started thinking more
about business ethics when my friend Dave asked me to join his advisory
board for a startup business and management practices consultancy.
Although he is a former employee of huge semiconductor companies,
Dave's skills are in the highest demand by small-to-midsize high-technology
companies, where he has the potential to provide the greatest benefits.
In today's business environment, these benefits frequently derive
from understanding ethics as a business process rather than as purely
the domain of an individual's moral judgment. In other words, corporate
operating practices should be established, maintained, and enforced,
by the corporation and not the individual employee. Furthermore,
corporate operating practices must be carefully constructed in a
logical manner as a process or procedure, rather than being led
by emotion.
Viewing ethics as a process or model, whereby we choose between
competing business and moral values, allows us to understand that
our decisions are, and must be, situational. That view allows
us to change our process or model as the business environment changes.
In short, we can first develop the basics of our ethics processes
and then update them in the light of new information, technologies,
laws, and competitive environments.
Dave believes that if companies treat ethics the same way they treat
any other business process, they will begin to reshape their cultures
to the way business ought to be conducted instead of accepting without
question the way it is conducted. We'll get back to business practices
that are more in line with the expectations of our customers, although
at times that economic and political pressures make it easier to
take an alternate route. This idea suggests that now is a good time
for individuals and corporations to tune their business processes
for the anticipated economic upturn.
Editorials are available online at:
http://www.mdronline.com/mpr_public/index.html
Markus Levy - Senior Editor {08/26/2002}
Fierce competitors that they are, IBM and
Motorola may not want to admit to being a team. Perhaps they're
not a team in the literal sense, but they do work together when
it comes to maintaining the prominence of the PowerPC architecture.
Both the diverse and similar products these companies offer
plug PowerPC into embedded markets that range from battery-powered
handheld devices (milliwatt operation) to high-end network routers
relying on gigahertz performance.
An earlier MPR article, "Motorola's Embedded PowerPC Story," reviewed
the products and architectures from the Motorola side of the PowerPC
camp. The analysis pointed out Motorola's strengths in standard
products and ASSPs that targeted applications like automotive, networking
(both client side and server side), and telecommunications. Likewise,
"IBM Delivers Multifaceted PowerPC Strategy" reviews IBM's products
and architectures, analyzing the company's strategy as it goes forward.
Microprocessor Report readers can access the full story here:
http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0826/163401.html. To find
out more about Microprocessor Report, please visit:
www.mdronline.com.
Max Baron - Principal Analyst {08/19/2002}
AMD, Intel, Motorola, NEC, and TI will be
using high-performance engines to compete for sockets in personal
digital assistants (PDA) and PDA/cell-phone integration. The new
offerings from these companies will compete in performance, power
consumption, integration level, and price.
Depending on the semiconductor process available, microprocessor
designers, in their quest for high-performance PDAs, use high-frequency
cores and/or parallel processing. As processors for handheld devices
approach the performance that only a few years ago was associated
with desktop and notebook PCs, they must be designed for optimum
performance and power consumption.
Microprocessor Report readers can access the full story here: http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0819/163301.html.
Markus Levy - Senior Editor {08/12/2002}
The status of Motorola's PowerPC business
has been a question weighing heavily on the minds of many people.
So in this article, we examined the products and strategy for the
company's PowerPC product lineup. The PowerPC architecture was originally
created to help Apple Computer escape the limitations of the Motorola
68000 family, but it has since gone on to achieve even higher unit
sales in the embedded market. In fact, the PowerPC architecture
in general, from both IBM and Motorola, has had tremendous success
in the embedded market. Furthermore, Motorola appears to be improving
its presence, recently rolling out management and manufacturing
plans to accommodate increased demand for its products. Enhanced
PowerPC designs are also due out in coming months.
Motorola is keeping second, third, and fourth generation PowerPC
products alive, and has plans to move many of its older products
to newer processes to allow lower power and higher operating frequencies.
However, Motorola's main engineering focus will be on the evolution
of e500-based products. The e500 is more oriented toward system-on-chip
applications than prior PowerPC cores were and will form the basis
of future application-specific devices from Motorola. One example,
is the new PowerQUICC III device, announced recently at Motorola's
recent Smart Networks Developers Forum (SNDF). There's no argument
that Motorola has done a tremendous job of penetrating the networking
application space with its wide range of PowerQUICC processors,
and this new processor generation will absolutely help maintain
its position, at least at the high end of the performance spectrum.
Also at the SNDF, Motorola announced EEMBC benchmark scores for
the bulk of its PowerPC architectures. Of course, these benchmark
numbers will help customers make more informed decisions, but the
numbers also represent Motorola's confidence in the capabilities
of its processors, as many of its competitors have been reluctant
to reveal their certified EEMBC scores. This article interprets
the meaning of the PowerPC scores.
Can Motorola, with new management and manufacturing emphasis, and
with SoC methods already proved in the communications processor
space, achieve the price/performance mix necessary to unseat IBM
in gaming or to find new high-volume markets for PowerPC? Well,
life is full of surprises.
Microprocessor Report readers can access the full story here:
http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0812/163201.html.
Max Baron - Principal Analyst {08/05/2002}
After a rather long wait by the market,
the first personal digital assistants (PDA) using Intel's PXA250
seem to be delivering a less-than-stellar performance. Application
software vendors, OEM designers, and Intel's team are looking for
problems that have not been solved yet: What are they really, how
can they be solved, and who should solve them?
Intel's design team contends that it has completed a well-balanced
design from the viewpoint of pure computing power versus peripheral
activity and that it has delivered, at 400MHz, the potential for
performance, but that it must be extracted by adequate improvements
in applications software.
Applications software vendors are worried by the additional work
that must be done on existing and future binaries and doubt the
results will bear out the promise of performance.
Microprocessor Report readers can access the full story here:
http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0805/163102.html.
Markus Levy - Senior Editor {08/05/2002}
It is an understatement to say ARM processors
are almost everywhere in the embedded market. Clearly, ARM is the
leading intellectual property (IP) provider for processor cores,
especially in wireless applications. Today, more than 1.3 billion
ARM-based devices are buried in a wide range of products - and that
number is growing at a rate of 100 million devices per quarter.
These amazing statistics raise a number of questions, among them:
What will ARM do to maintain its lead in its various markets? How
will ARM move to higher performance levels and compete against MIPS,
PowerPC, and products from the new configurable-processor companies?
ARM's success was derived from various factors, one being that the
ARM processor was the first 32-bit CPU to be offered as a licensed
core, and another being that the company was in the right place
at the right time. Die area and power consumption also played a
big role in the company's success, aiding its entrenchment in wireless
devices. Features like Java, speech recognition, and integrated
cameras, such as those found in the new Sony PDA/Cell phone, will
drive performance requirements up, and will, it is hoped, motivate
ARM licensees to migrate to the company's higher-performance ARM9
and ARM10 products. This hope also holds true for other markets,
such as digital music, client-side networking, automotive products,
and hard-disk controllers.
Maintaining ARM's lead in its established markets has been of less
concern to ARM than expanding into higher-performance arenas. There,
the simple single-issue ARM architecture runs headlong into the
powerful, sophisticated superscalar RISC offerings. The new ARM11
may have the basic building blocks to succeed, and if ARM is to
continue its historical growth, it must get licensees to adopt the
more-powerful ARM architectures.
Microprocessor Report readers can access the full story here:
http://www.mdronline.com/mpr/h/2002/0805/163101.html.
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