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Intel Allowed to Buy Digital Signal Processor Co.
vivekb writes "C|Net reports that the federal anti-trust review period for Intel's bid to buy DSP Communications expired yesterday. This gives clearance for Intel's $1.6 billion offer to proceed. Watch for Intel DSPs to arrive shortly." Texas Instruments has dominated the market for digital signal processor chips for years. It looks like this is about to change big-time.
...do big companies like Intel feel they have something to offer in neighboring markerts? Isn't there such a thing as effeciency due to being small and fast? Big companies that do this don't necessarily make a better product, they merely weed out competitors more easily. Microsoft, Worldcom, IBM, Sun...it seems like when they buy shit, they either kill in that markert by their sheer size, or the product flops because they can't keep up with smaller, specialized shops.
Argh, enough with the mergers already...one-stop shopping is cool for supermarkert, but that's about it...
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
Actually.. they put em in sound cards now.. In fact.. the Soundblaster Live! Value has a DSP with the horsepower of a pentium 166. :)
:)
Uh, third post?
-Warren
DSPs are in modems, cell-phones, hard-drives, sound cards, and tons of other places. I wonder which market Intel is going to aim for. The article seems to state they're interested in wireless, which is currently a big business for DSP. I can't imagine that's all they're interested in though.... Hrmm......
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I know someone who worked for a large chemical company and had an idea of how the company could expand their business. He brought it to the attention of the company and they looked into the feasability of the project. After careful consideration they decided that they could only make a couple million on the project.
The guy simply quit his job and started his own company to do it instead. Now he heads up a multimillion dollar corporation.
Sounds like a real fairy tale right? The moral is that a million bucks means more to an individual that a large corporation. These big companies have to throw a lot of cash into a project to get it going because they have more overhead, and they often don't make enough profit to make it worthwile.
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
I understand that getting a finger in every pie is the wave of business today, and that the most popular method of doing so is by absorbing other companies, but is Intel really doing the smart thing here? I mean, their core business, CPUs, is, for the first time in a long while, actually being threatened by serious competition, and this is occuring at a crucial time as the focus on 64-bit processing is broadening, an arena already occupied by others that Intel will have to break into. On the 32-bit front, AMD's Athlon has been very well received by the reviewers and the OEMs are now expanding their sales of Athlon-based systems while Intel is having an apparant problem with meeting the demand for Pentium IIIs as the holiday season approaches, according to this article at ABCNews.com. Perhaps they have gotten too secure in their niche market that they have dominated for so long to recognize when it is beginning to be seriously threatened.
Deosyne
A nice read with some background on the company, how it came to be and noting the big breakthrough in 1994 - capturing a large piece of the digital cellular phone market in Japan. Their biggest focus is now on the American cellular market with US contracts that should contribute more than 24% of their estimated revenue for 1999.
something wicked this way comes...
What else to do? Diversify is the key. Intel already makes the ARM processor (licensed from the UK's ARM holdings) and Intel will pretty soon have a big share in DSPC. What do these two companies (ARM and DSPC) have in common? Both are targeting the cellular market - and both have a good share in it already.
Instead of having all its eggs in one basket, I see this as a strategic move from Intel to diversify its equity. Getting a foot in the door you may say...
something wicked this way comes...
Modems are only one place where DSPs is used. Actually computers itselfs is only one fragment of all DSP usage. DSPs are widely used by electronics industry.
Besides of the computers DSPs are used in (for example):
- Motor Control Systems
- Measurement Equipment
- Data Communications Systems
- Scientific Research
- Industry Automation Systems
and so on.
DSP is quite new invention on computer related products if you compare it to the time line of the DSP.
"Just the information.."
-AZi
Bottom line is they'll probably wriggle out of any serious consequences unless they do something really boneheaded, like falsify evidence at the trial. :)
Why don't tech reporters have any clue when it comes to DSPs?
I wouldn't put money on that. DSPC's product line covers only one segment of the DSP market: CDMA and TDMA wireless products. Qualcomm wrote the book on CDMA and has its own line of chipsets to handle the protocol which sells very well. And AFAIK, the TDMA market isn't anywhere near that of CDMA.
The people who design DSP-based products select chips for their systems based on things they can measure. Texas Instruments has a huge head start with the TMS320Cx0 line in terms of available development tools and the excellent track record of its deployed units. Once you've got a library of software for one DSP, switching to another requires almost as much effort as rewriting it, so even if Intel was going into the general-purpose DSP business, you're not going to see engineers switching on trendy whims.
I wouldn't start screaming "monopoly" or "antitrust violation," either. Aside from the x86 line, the only other processors Intel makes are the i960, StrongARM (under license) and MCS microcontrollers. None of those come anywhere near being suitable for high-performance DSP applications, nor are any of them leaders in their segment. Somebody at Intel may be realizing that the x86 cash cow may eventually stop giving milk and that if the intend to survive beyond the PC era, they're going to have to diversify.
Texas Instruments is the Intel of the DSP industry, except that they make a better product and don't throw their weight around. (Funny how the companies that make better products and are on top of their markets don't have to resort to intimidation to beat their competition.) I've done work on the i960 and TMS320Cx0, and where the former was a bug-ridden disaster from square one, the latter was a joy to work with. (It might sound like I'm comparing apples and oranges here because the i960 isn't a DSP chip, but both are processors and one showed much better design than the other.) If Intel wants to compete in the DSP arena, they've got a lot of self-improvement and catching up to do.
And to make this a complete slashdot post: All of these chips would be lousy in Beowulf clusters. :-)
Economies of scopeare the gains from being in different markets that share (in this case) technology. Muchof what intel does is alsouseful for DSP's, making it less expensive overall for intel to make CPU's and DSP's than for intel to makeone, and someone else the other.
The MMX extensions to the Pentium processor was a move in the direction of on-chip DSP. The G4 processor is a PowerPC core with an on-chip VLIW DSP. You could stretch the analogy and say that off-chip math coprocessors like the 80387 and the 68881/2 are a similar idea.
DSPs are useful in modems because of the kind of math used for picking signals out of noise, and for decoding bits from the extracted signal. I took a course on detection and estimation once, and the math is fascinating, but it's definitely not the only thing DSPs can do.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
My favorite DSP company (and product-line) is Analog Devices. They are relatively cheap, fast, and well architected.
I am glad people have stayed away from buying these guys.
-AP
I never called AMDa "bad company" nor would I. Your taking many liberties on what I was saying.
1. I never said Intel wont lose money. I said that it wont hurt them, and that to me means a major drain in capital. Intel has tried to undercut AMD at times so AMD will lose more profits, and Intel's hope is leave the market. Unlike AMD, Intel has deep pockets which means if they lose profits, but so does AMD - AMD will have a rougher time than Intel. That holds true in any market, as long as the bigger business is not losing a significant amount to empty their pockets.
Intel x86 chips are still standard in Dell laptops and desktops, as well as many other large resellers. Smaller chains and stores sell a good deal of AMD based machines, but also many Intel based ones too. Intel has pressured motherboard manufactures in attempts to hurt AMD even more.
2. AMD's brand name is not as well known or well acreditted as Intel's. Intel lived of the Pentium brandname for years, which has for the most part been in good light. Before that the public knew of Intel because they have always been the major supplier of PC processors, which the Intel Inside campaign strengthened. Businesses and even the non-computer savy public would sooner trust Intel than AMD - its all through name brands. I've read numerous articles claiming that businesses will be weary towards multi-proccessor AMD machines, as Intel has proven itself in SMP over the years. Read Creating the Digital Future by Albert Yu. Oh, and I never said something new cannot be better, it just has a hard time replacing the old.
3. Being a standard choice for resellers means Intel has significant market. That does not mean AMD and chipset/motherboards will not be compatable (though I remember the software warnings of incompatabilities before the K6).
4. AMD obtained a significant market share by undercutting Intel. People do care, but AMD lost significant profits combatting the Celeron processor. Intel made significant money by creating chips cheaper than its rivals on other platforms. I agree people do care, but that doesn't mean everyone immediately flocks for the cheapest brand.
5. I mentioned the exploits in showing that Intel has not spent money on R&D in the x86 processor business compared to AMD. Intel has merely made tweaks to a processor and than resold it, while AMD has reserched, tested, and brought to market new chip designs. Why would anyone be happy that Intel has exploited its userbase by refusing to improve its technology if being idle creates such massive profits? One could easily say the same with Microsoft Windows, considering how it used Windows 98, and soon Windows Millenium. It created Windows 95, and will exploit that codebase with tweaks for 5 or more years. Its the same.
If your right that Intel scrapped their P7 design, than Intel's in trouble. Plain and simple. All they have left is to use the hype of the IA-64 technology to sell their new high end chip, and perhaps begin to pay attention to the personal computer market after AMD wins it. AMD's competing for survival, Intel for deeper profits. Guess who has, and will continue, to work in the intrests of consumers?
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