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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.'"
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.
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
CEO != geek. CTO == geek.
CEO == Business major attractive enough for TV interviews.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
(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.
- 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?
The only issue I've had with motherboards is getting any OS (not just
Linux, but Windows too) to use the slipshot onboard junk (onboard
sound and video mostly; the onboard LAN has only given me trouble
a couple of times). I've basically concluded that when you buy
a motherboard you should assume if you don't know otherwise that
you will have to buy separate sound and video cards even if they
are supposedly included onboard, so you shouldn't consider a board
that lacks these onboard components to be inferior in any way; if
anything, it's probably better.
And I agree about motherboards not having bad Linux support (if
you discount problems with cheap onboard sound and video; as far
as onboard LAN, given the price of ethernet cards these days, I'm
dubious as to why anyone would care whether the onboard LAN works).
I've had trouble with soundcards, been lucky with modems (which
seem to give a lot of people trouble), and heard horror stories
about video cards (my advice: buy Matrox unless you really need
the gamer-style 3D junk; my Mystique has worked OOTB with every
OS I've tried it with and does great 2D), but I've not had Linux
give me trouble about running on any particular motherboard yet.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.