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CEOs Of The Motherboard Market Talk Shop
k-hell writes "An interesting piece from AnandTech: 'What do you get when you gather 13 of the most influential CEOs in the motherboard market? An excellent avenue to understand where this industry is headed. Find out what the heads of the motherboard industry think about everything from AMD's Opteron to the future of the worldwide economy in our first quarterly CEO Forum.'"
What you get is a lot of pigopolists' hot air.
CEOs are not the visionaries, generally - what would be far more interesting would be to gather some of the leading engineers from these companies, and ask them how they thought the market would progress over the next few years.
A geek Royal Rumble?
all those questions and they didn't ask them whether they were going to be more Linux friendly with their motherboards...
What we really want is proper manufacturers' drivers for all the chipsets on the board, included on the CD that comes with the motherboard.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The problem with assuming that the motherboard CEOs are going to be driving the market is that it misses the fact that there are so many. This happens in commodity markets which become well understood and have a relatively low R&D expense. Higher levels of R&D (for instance graphics cards) mean less competition and higher turnover of companies. The motherboard people provide a required commodity in a computer that is a bit more complex that the power supply, but it is not what will drive the industry forwards.
These are followers, not leaders, of the industry. Just because they plug-in other peoples processors to specs created by those other people does not mean that they innovate the market. Its an interesting read from people who can see their part of the market, but it doesn't give a roadmap for the longer term.
Now what I'd like to see would be a closed room discussion with CCTV cameras between, Jobs, Ellison, Gates and McNeally.... with knives. THAT would tell you which way the market was going
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
NO... RTFA
you couldn't be @rsed but you posted anyway...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
One-sentence summary:
The article appears to focus on an inititive from Anandtech to unify the thoughts of 13 major mainboard manufacturing big bosses to point the industry where it wants to go.
Personally, however, I am not completely in favour of such an idea. I am not knowledgeable in hardware design/manufacture. I do know, however, that in the software world (or perhaps only in free/open-source/open-minded software), a large group of people slowly nudge a project where the users want it to go. Besides the obvious difference that hardware is very physical, what stops a group of people with common interests to draft up their own freely-distrubutable mainboard specs and see if they can start a bit of a new way of thinking? Perhaps the bar is raised too high already? Or am I missing something?
Well, it's an interesting piece from AnandTech. It tells us about what you get when you gather 13 of the most influential CEOs in the motherboard market. You get an excellent avenue to understand where this industry is headed. You find out what the heads of the motherboard industry think about everything from AMD's Opteron to the future of the worldwide economy in our first quarterly CEO Forum.
Is that ok?
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Perhaps, though, the great deal of manufacturers is more of a blessing. Admittedly, this is a blessing that is not yet being harvested. A mindset change--as hard as it is--might allow these manufacturers to work together towards things users (if only the elite users who understand mainboards) want. This, instead of "Standards are good. Let's make one."
It's getting to the point that having everything on-board on the MoBo is actually a good idea. They are cheap, and despensible. If something goes wrong, you simply swap out the board and you end up getting an upgrade to the rest of the components in the processes. At this point, with all-in-one boards becomming more and more speciallized like the nForce from nVidia, it's starting to look like the PC is becomming more console like in nature. As for the gaming consoles of today, we can just look at the PS2. It's platform can function as a PC basically with the added network interface and USB ports. And the GameCube is basically a mini Apple. It has an IBM CPU with ATI graphics. If it had any more memory, it could prolly run OSX. Basically, each generation the line between what defines PC and Console blur more and more.
Life is not for the lazy.
Oh come on, it's not *that* off-topic.
ABIT: Anyone know when Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 are coming out?
Will you continue to save 2 cents per board by using cheap electrolytic capacitors that leak after 12 months' use?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I basically copy and paste the article summary from the front page as a weak attempt at humour (I have flu so it's also my best shot) and someone mods it as interesting.
It seems people don't even read the front page anymore!
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
Nothing about mini-itx? What the heck.
This article said little to nothing. The only part of interest was what the ceo's thought the effect 9/11 were.
Everything Zen;
Everything Zen;
I don't think so!!!
I find it interesting that CEO#5 on question 1 refers to "clone market". This term used to be popular when the "real" PC was IBM and the cheap Taiwanese compatibles were "clones" but it's been a long time since I last heard anyone refer to a generic PC as a "clone".
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
"What do you get when you gather 13 of the most influential CEOs in the motherboard market? "
A cartel?
Bet you any money they still won't be able to produce laptop-sized motherboards for sale to the general public - presumably to ensure that you can't get a decent laptop for less than £1300.
(a) all of these vendors are ultimately competitors. surely the things they will publicly agree on as "good/bad/whatever" will be agreed on because it is the lowest common denominator, blindingly obvious, or otherwise something that does not give away internal development hints nor affect the bottom line (b) all of these vendors are ultimately in thrall to the one big kahuna of the motherboard industry, Intel. By this I don't mean in terms of motherboards shipped (even though Intel does ship a whole lot) - I mean in terms of the CPUs used and the chipsets supplied. Which one of these CEOs is going to give the skinny on strong-arm-elbow-twisting, e.g. anti-VIA action, etc.? The CEO that is shorting his own stock, that's who. So they DO talk some about Intel (Nvidia's interactions etc.) - what's it really worth? Are they REALLy telling you the inside news? (c) historically industry predictions have always been fucked up. One big reason why Moore's "law" is repeatedly cited is because it's one of the few predictions that came out more-or-less true: where are our flying cars, robot helpers, etc? nowhere, that's where. "motherboards will get smaller". Excellent prediction, Sherlock. Let me predict another: the model numbers will increment. This kind of "news" is the kind of pap that rubbish news/journos push out, like how all those articles trumpeting the impact of the dotcoms right up until the bubble burst.
The author, of the article, placed too many, commas, in the article.
Maybe one, was inserted, each time, he/she, stopped to, think?
It is also not clear whether the replies from CEO#1 refers to the first CEO in the list at the top of the article, or if the order has purposely been scrambled to limit the fallout at a given company. When I clicked on the a link (the word "business" in CEO#2's reply, I thought I would find out what company he was from, instead it sends you to a big popup window for Microsoft.
If there is no direct attribution and the editors play so freely with mixing advertising into what the execs are supposedly saying, how do we even know this is all true? (I presume it is true on the other hand how do follow a thread of what a given CEO is saying, and was this even conducted in English or is this a translation from Chinese?) Personally this made me take AnandTech's "first ever CEO forum" with a big fat grain of salt even before getting into the main part of the article. I'd prefer they use big ads you can't miss than to attempt subversion of the text itself.
Well I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they have told each CEO what their number is so they can check the homepage for accuracy. But realistically this seems silly since with enough answers anybody knowledgeable ought to be able to figure out who is who, and I would be surprised if each CEO's employees are (if they heard of AnandTech) demanding to know which number he is. All this seems to contribute to the closed nature of the business which the leader explains. Usually when a company hosts a CEO Forum (like the Economist Conference I saw a couple days ago where the French CEO of Nissan Carlos Ghosn was present) you have them actually talking to each other and you can identify who is who. This cloak and dagger idiocy is a waste of the reader's time!
Interresting (at least for me) is that most of the CEO's see a emerging market in barebone desktops and servers.
This means that they see Linux et al. taking a more substansial part of the market.
- 4 questions about the economy (it's getting a little better but not stellar)
- 2 questions about future goals (market consolidation and cost pressures will continue, so we'll play it smart)
- 1 question on China (it's cheaper there)
- 2 questions blindsided by simultaneous press releases
- 1 interesting (but not earthshattering) question about predominance of graphics chipset manufacturers. Unfortunately they all answered differently so no followup except a note about ATI's deal with Intel.
On second thought Anandtech's problem with ethical advertising is perhaps moot since they hardly made the success this article is portrayed to be. Lukewarm answers with little relevance to most Slashdot readers.Think of the questions they could have asked! I thought maybe they would pull a fast one by getting grassroots support for NVIDIA onboard but nope. Sony (who have just announced they will use their own chips in the future) has experimented with manufacturing based on user requests. And there ought to be quite a lot of competition if 20 companies are involved. How come there is no attempt to laser in on how to make use of this competition by announcing plans for exciting technology, modularity, form factors, even information most people don't know about, like how many motherboards you have to buy before you can ask them for custom designs? Are we just reading about cloneheads or are we reading about the killers of the Onyx? Come on!
Here is an example. I recently saw the Grape supercomputer chip which was built in Japan for astronomical calculations being used for simulation of molecules (van der waals and other forces) for bioinformatics. The thing ran off a linux box. Now these chips are maybe a bit hairy and custom, certainly only a handful around. But Apple's Altivec vector processor has proven to be one of the reasons people are using their machines in the bioinfo industry (one of the few growing ones right now).
I mean geez, not even any information about on-board digital video encoding support or things which might even have some impact on say linux pvrs or consumer demand. What about onboard support for high speed communications like GB ethernet, 802.11g, 3G/4G, firewire?
How about some information about motherboard manufacturers offering some juicy performance or (shudder) some words on maybe reversing the trend toward planned obsolescense? Would you not pay a little more for a motherboard that could stick with the next generation of chips without having to be thrown in the closet?
I found the reaction of CEO #1 to the question of bigger companies getting bigger and small companies getting smaller rather odd.
...wasn't IBM the biggest computer company 20 years ago? We believe a company with creative mindset and innovation tradition can always find a way to differentiate products.
CEO #1:
IBM may have taken a backseat to more visible companies like Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Apple, etc, but I wouldn't say they've gotten smaller. In my mind, IBM is the 900 pound gorilla that you shouldn't mess with (SCO, anyone?). Perhaps I am just ill-informed, but I would say that IBM is a *major* industry heavyweight. It hasn't been so long that IBM is not the competition, they are the environment
-phish
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD LEARN TO USE PARAGRAPHS
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
"'What do you get when you gather 13 of the most influential CEOs in the motherboard market?"
Some imposters?
I can't name 13 mobo manufacturers, someone's lying...
Perhaps someone could clear this question up for me. Who would ever buy a motherboard branded 'Albatron'?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
8% is 'low' growth? For one thing people need to readjust their expectations, it's all relative (just like 'fast' is relative to something). When your growth rates are 25-30% and then normalcy returns, 12% growth is 'doom, gloom and disaster'. However when your savings are getting 1.5%, then 12% is fantastic. The period of everybody going from no pc to having a pc and then upgrading every 3 years are largely over and not likely to return, just like the Japan boom in the 80's when the US went from no vcr's and other consumer electronics to getting vcr's and a new one every 3 years (becaused the early one's sucked, just like early pc's). The gushing oil wells and rush to find unimaginably rich gold veins have been largely played out - now there are late comer miners crawling all over the hills hoping to find their pot of gold that the early prospectors hauled away long ago. The PC void has been largely filled - from now on it's just maintenance and an ocassional mass purchase from new business. However, those new businesses are usually experienced smart shoppers now that will shop for the best prices for the best quality and not just pay whatever you invoice them for (except for Windows 80% profit margin, because they have no choice in the so called Msft 'ecology' economy that even the US govt is buying into)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Remond Lu - CEO, ABIT Computer
Jack Ko - CEO, Albatron Technology Co., LTD.
Bernie Tsai - President, AOpen Inc.
Jonney Shih - Chairman and CEO, Asustek Computer Inc.
Simon Ho - Chairman of the Board, Chaintech Computer
Yen-Chi Lu - Chairman of the Board, DFI
Johnson Chiang - Chairman of the Board, Elitegroup Computer Systems
Jerry C. Ferng - CEO, Epox Computer Co., LTD.
Richard Ma - Executive Vice President, Giga-Byte Technology
Joseph Hsu - CEO and President, Micro-Star International Co., LTD.
David Yu - President, Shuttle Inc.
Andy Cheu - President, SOYO Computer Inc.
Symon Chang - CEO, Tyan Computer
There are real technical issues to laptop motherboards. It's not all 'Cartel effect' no matter how much people might like to invent a conspiracy.
Two of the biggest issues that come to mind:
1: Laptops have much tighter motherboard/peripheral/case integration than desktops. Desktops practically have none at all, just wrap plastic or metal around standard-sized components and make sure you have enough air packaged in there that it can flow. Clearances inside a standard case can be measured in substantial fractions of an inch, sometimes in multiple inches. Laptops don't have that kind of space to burn. On some laptops, the bottom of the battery forms part of the bottom of the case, and the same may exist for other components.
Because of this, you can't have 'supplier of the week' like you can in desktops. Every part has to be just-so, physically.
2: Laptops have to have tighter power integration. It isn't just SpeedStep or PowerNow in the CPU, it's quiescing peripherals, putting DRAM to sleep, etc. The BIOS has to be much more aware of all of the parts.
Again, this plays against 'supplier of the week' because the subtle differences really count in power management.
The interviewed CEOs are in the bargain-basement business, where success may well be measured in pennies per component. That model is not appropriate to the laptop market, and attempting to bring out such might well dilute their focus on their core market.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Really is that so hard. Should I be forced to use a PCI card if I want to dual head it w/o buying a dual head card - what if I want to quad head it, shouldn't I be able to use 2 AGP ports.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Warning Don't read science fiction and slashdot at the same time..
I agree, two major PC buying groups (1) Gamers heavy, and (2) SOHO light, but I think there is another (3) Specialty/Hobby weird, wired, and wireless.
... not a want]) (4) 40 to 80GB SSD for the extremely fast boot to default OS & Apps, fast swapping between OS and/or Apps (user-friendly and intuitive), maintain/access all default/active defined user data files on voice command, (5) Built in physical and virtual security user configurable, auto update option, and incorruptible/unalterable (except at time of physical keyboard boot) forensic files, (6) SFF built around the processors, SDD, KVM projector (no LCD/CRT/...), and wireless (no cables, all wireless communications) all other ... harddisc, RWCD/DVD/..., RAID array, ... are external modular network devices that can be configured for shared, permissive, or secure access, and can be turned on/off and connected/disconnected whenever (leave them at home or work and access the networked devices from wherever in the world by wireless), (7) The keyboard, mouse, ... and monitor are projected on any available flat surface and auto contrast and color project appropriately for the surface used, (8) the SFF-PC must weigh less than 5Kg and have a usable battery life of 10 hours and standby of 72 hours. (8) Also, real broadband bandwidth (over 2Mb/s) would be nice, ultra-broadband (over 5Mb/s) would be better, and the telcos could only charge $50 a month for a dedicated always on connection with great QoS for VPN, VoIP, VTC, ... (well PPV movies could be extra) .... (9) Telemetry, sensors, sense prosthesis inputs for the handicap, network devices for medical, travel (personal, public, auto, ... schedules, maintenance, AI auto-chauffer/pilot), allergens, .... Dang, I always feel like, I forgot to mention something. Well , I did say it was a dream and it is all existing technology, but not packaged how I want. I can hope ... before I die ... at 90 years old my smart-car will drive me to work, my Jordy big-screen vision goggles will allow me to read /. at lunch time %~>, my doctors will see the big-one (stroke, heart attack, ...) about to kill me, and save my life for the 42nd time, because my insurance (my reason for working) is all paid up for the year.
For the other group I provide my dream future (3-5 years from now):~o
(1) less than $5K, (2) multi-RISC-processors (maybe transmeta) 7 GHz 64bit instructions per cycle (3) any and all OS(multiple, Vmware, Linux&BSD&Microsoft&...) with any all Applications (including Apple-X & Active-X [just a point
Okay, if 3-5 from now ain't possible, then how about in 5-10 years.%~}
HAVE FUN
OldHawk777
Reality is a self induced hallucination.
Sometimes, I just gotta wonder off topic in to the twilight zone.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
The mother of all motherboards?
Well sheesh, somebody had to say it.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Exactly!
This isn't popular to say I'm sure, but when it comes to pushing new technologies out the door into motherboard design, Intel is the clear frontrunner. Let's go through some of the items we now take for granted that Intel brought to us:
And I'm sure I've left out quite a few...
Really, they should have had a competent journalist asking the questions. General comments on the economy do not make an intersting article make. At least for the techie audience that Anandtech serves. Actually, that shows that 13 CEOs might be too much. Followups become more relevanyt when you can identify the CEO by name, and ask them specific questions. Nice concept, but it didn't work.
... how many of these guys are planning to jump on board with TCPA?
Asus and ABit don't do this. They may have been bitten by the initial problems, but now that they are aware of the problem, they don't continue to use the bad caps.
If you buy the cheapest mobo, you will get one with some corners cut.
Don't like it? Pay for quality.
We've got a LONG way to go in terms of ease of computer assembly before I'll agree that swapping out motherboards is a "good idea".