Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
That may sound good and all, but the engineers have very little to do with the future. That is not their job. The CEO is a very good choice since it is their direction that R&D follows and eventually, the engineers build.
Better still, would be the CEOs of the real drivers in the industry. Intel, AMD, IBM - where the innovation really takes place. The motherboard companies more or less follow suit to whatever these guys do.
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.
The problem ...motherboard CEOs are going to be driving the market ... there are so many. This happens in commodity markets
This is actually a good thing. In fact it's the redeeming aspect when Intel makes chipsets that make running Linux a tough experience. A large no. of mobo mfrs means more slaves for MS/Intel to buy out / contain. The market stays a commodity market this way.
which become well understood and have a relatively low R&D expense
Actually, we 'think' that the mobo business is a well-understood one. How many of us know the role of mobos in the Palladium effort? How many u'stand the compulsions of BIOS writers like AMI who act as poodles to gorillas? And lastly, 5 mobos with the same chipset give 5 different benchmark results. How does this happen? In a truly commodity market, the only differentiator is price, not performance or quality.
Just because they plug-in other peoples processors to specs created by those other people does not mean that they innovate the market.
Processor alone does not a mobo make. In fact, a cheap mobo can screw the performance figures of a top CPU. Mobo mfrs innovate by NOT adopting Palladium, designing own chipsets, etc. It's the rest of the folks - CPU makers, video card makers, s/w writers, etc. that don't innovate.
"what I'd like to see would be a closed room discussion with CCTV cameras between, Jobs, Ellison, Gates and McNeally.... with knives."
Actually all 4 of them have enuff money for 100s of lifetimes, and are unlikely to care two hoots about where the tech world is heading. You'd get better results with Bill Gates, RMS, Linus Torvalds, Slashdot Jack and Joe ServicePack - no knives, no censorship, no ducking questions - in full public view. That should be interesting.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
"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.