Oh, and for the mobile phone market, there's Atom.
Are Intel licensing that to other manufacturers for SOC use? No? Then it's not a real player; cutting the component count at the overall device level is more important than speed to phone makers, as it's cheaper for them like that.
Intel sells full fledged SoCs equivalent to Samsung's Exynos line, etc. with Atom cores. Sure ARM licenses cores, but they aren't even a fabeless chip company they're a processor IP company. They sell Nvidia, Samsung, MediaTek etc. the right right to use ARM IP in their SoCs, which are then fabricated by TSMC, GlobalFoundries etc. Of course Intel isn't going to license you their cores. They want to sell you an SoC they designed, not their IP. That's like saying Qualcomm isn't a real player in the SoC business because they didn't license the Krait core to anyone else.
In addition, on a more general note, comparing margins from fabless guys to Intel is always a bit disingenuous. Intel, being vertically integrated, gets to combine the margins of the foundry, core IP house, EDA guys, and final SoC integrator. Of course they'll have better gross margins.
Apple was pretty much the only company that could demand decoupled basebands at that time. As others have mentioned, there are other phones coming out know with standalone Qualcomm basebands. And that still doesn't account for the fact that baseband integration improves power efficiency (assuming everything else is equal, which is not always the case.)
As I said, nearly everyone uses Qualcomm's SoCs for their high end phones if they want LTE because Qualcomm has a near monopoly on LTE basebands. (Even the new Exynos based SIII's with LTE use a separate Qualcomm baseband.) It's almost always better for power efficiency if you have an integrated baseband. Until recently, Qualcomm would not sell you a separate LTE baseband, so if you wanted LTE you had to buy their SoC as well. (This was likely due to dedicating their stand-alone baseband supply to the iPhone5 ramp.)
Intel has some of it's processor design team in Israel. However, all their manufacturing R&D is done in Portland. All of their other fabs just duplicate the setup they create for each node in Portland. However, I don't think that Intel is in any danger of losing IP in Israel, (unlike the similar dangers that exist when manufacturing in east Asia.)
Re:The reason Samsung is using Qualcomm stuff...
on
Is Qualcomm the New AMD?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
No it's because Qualcomm owns the LTE market. In order to sell a phone with LTE you have to buy a baseband from Qualcomm since they make the only capable LTE chips on the market. Qualcomm (i.e., it's foundries) have been capacity constrained for at least a year now so they can insist you buy their entire SoC with integrate LTE baseband if you want an LTE chip. (That's ignoring the fact that you usually have less power consumption if your baseband and SoC are on the same die.)
Intel has sent nothing overseas. Their manufacturing R&D is all done in Oregon, and most of their leading edge chips are made in Oregon and Arizona with fabs in Israel and Ireland as well. They have exactly one fab in China that makes 65nm products, which now just consists of some old chipsets.
Qualcomm manufacture ARM chips, like a dozen other companies, there is nothing special about them.
This is explicitly false. Qualcomm designed their own cores that implement the ARM instruction set. They did not license the Cortex A-x designs and glue them together (like every other ARM SoC vendor, including Samsung.) That also ignores the fact that they are the only ones making usable LTE basebands right now. Qualcomm right now is so dominant that if anything, they're the Intel of the mobile world.
This random article I found has good pictures. This new chamber will allow for precise etch control from layer to layer. It's already in place at customer sites for R&D. (No company usually announces these products without having some placements or at least earlier marketing.) No one really knows how soon 3D NAND is coming; it depends on exactly how low they can scale 2D NAND, which is limited by the number of electrons you can store in a floating gate. 3D NAND designs usually use a charge trapping dielectric layer instead of polysilicon to store charge, the layers are then stacked to allow multiple layers of storage. But to contact each layer separately, you will need to etch through each layer in a sort of staircase pattern, which requires really good control of the etch process.
Caltech operates a federal lab, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and receives federal money to do so. The Institute ("Universtiy") is run from that source of funding.
Caltech is not run by money from from the federal government. JPL is run by Caltech using federal money. The chemistry (and other unreleated) labs on campus are not (at least not any more so than at any other university; pretty much every university in the country receives some source of funding from the federal government, through grants from thttp://science.slashdot.org/story/12/02/13/0331221/nasa-considers-privatizing-galex-astrophysics-satellite#he NSF, DOE, etc.)
AMD is a fabless company now. They contract out their manufacturing to their former fabs (including the one in Dresden), which is a separate company that they own ~10% of. That company is building a new fab in Saratoga County in NY. Their former Austin fab was spun off with their flash memory division as Spansion. It's no where close to being a leading edge fab. It still uses 200 mm wafers.
AMD lost its fabs a while ago. (Their fabs are part of GlobalFoundries now, and they're a bit ahead of TSMC, but not anywhere close to Intel in terms of process capabilities.)
Really?! Then what is a government supposed to tax. Any economist will tell you that negative externalities are *exactly* what a government is supposed to tax and then use the money to subsidize positive externalities. The government is certainly not the most efficient body in the world, but I'd argue that compensating for externalities should be the government's first priority.
Trust me, Intel is so far ahead of everyone else in process technology, it's not even close. Yeah, someone else will eventually make FinFETs in production but by then I wouldn't be surprised to see Intel with transistors that have III-V and Ge channels. And lithography limitations are already resulting in very restricted design rules for design engineers. As they are pretty much the only vertically integrated company semiconductor company left, they'll have a rather large advantage in knowing exactly how to tune their designs to fit the limitations of their mask sets, etc.
One of the problems with open source hardware is that the highest performance chips are designed under restrictive design rules which are a result of fabrication process limitations at the smallest technology nodes. That's one of the biggest reasons the semiconductor industry hasn't moved entirely to a fabless model. The folks making high performance computing hardware need to know exactly what limitations are imposed upon them by the fabrication process. And the fabircation process will never become "open source" (at least not until Moore's law no longer works), there' just way too much money invested in process technology for it to be freely released.
This is nonsense (or at best an utterly pessimistic view on the value of Google). Let us assume that you currently possess $50 worth of tangible assets. Suppose I signed a contract with you saying that I had to give you $100 for your work on zoology 1 year from today. How much should someone be willing to pay you right now for all to all of your money for time immemorial? Assuming I am perfectly credit worthy, someone should give you ~$150 (actually slightly less accounting for inflation reducing the value of $100 in the future, rates of return on other risk free opportunities, etc.). Now suppose that this fictional investor has noticed that you seem to have been able to get me to sign this contract for $100 every year for the last 5 years. If you knew I was absolutely guaranteed to get $100 every year for the rest of time, and the rate of return+inflation on the best alternative risk-free investment was 7%, someone would be willing to pay 50+sum[100/(1+r)^n,{n,1,Infinity}]=$1478.57 for access to all of your money. Replace all these values on these contracts with the expected value of the profits of Google and the appropriate interest rate and then divide by the number of outstanding shares and you would get how much someone should be willing to pay for a share of Google's stock. The market comes into play by determining the expected value of Google's profits. If the price of Google is going up, it's because they think that the future profits of Google are higher than what the market currently thinks they are going to be. If it's going down then the opposite is true. Your valuation scheme is based on the idea that Google will make no profits in the future, which is so utterly pessimistic as to be silly.
Chances are you would be one of those people. There's an extremely good chance that some of your retirement savings are invested in some fund that owns shares in BP. Congratulations on your criminal record.
Great post. Furthermore, the law only prohibits these practices when they are undertaken for the purpose of injuring or destroying your competition. And in regards to the history, I'm pretty sure the law was initially drafted to prevent Asian suppliers of microchips from dumping them below cost in the US.
Sure, I accept that the toys are great, but scientifically? It's time wasted.
At some point people are going to ask
what did you accomplish?
If you're a mathematician especially, you'll have nothing to show for it, and if your reports ever get published
in the future, they'll be long obsolete and irrelevant.
Who cares? You're getting paid to do what you love and are provided with all the toys you can think of to do that stuff with. If I was a mathematician, I wouldn't really consider that sort of job to be unfulfilling. (Ethical and moral dilemmas are another matter.)
Do you know how many times Disney has claimed Snow White, Cinderella, etc. is being put in the vault forever?
You still can't understand the argument I'm making about plays and movies? A play is by definition a live performance. A video of the play is not equivalent, or else the play would be a movie. Many people believe that the closest we can get to that without putting on a live performance is a script. In the case of a movie, the video is the movie. No one thinks that a script of the movie is a better representation of it than the movie itself. However, some people do think that the script of a play is a better representation of a play that a video of it. Now do you understand my point?
As for your copyright alternative, you still refuse to actually say what it is. By the way, generally speaking, calling someone an ignoramus for disagreeing with something you haven't even brought up yet is a great way to conduct an argument.
Public goods are, by definition nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. Copyright is an attempt to negate both of those characteristics. You can't consistently say that copyright enables a public good because it tries to make it not a public good. You can't have it both ways simultaneously. Trust me, I'm pretty sure I know more about the economics of copyright than you do, been studying it for nearly 20 years now.
Really, studying it for 20 years? Then you'd know that the existence of externalities makes a market inefficient. The only two ways I've ever heard of for correcting for an externality is to artificially create a market for it (via copyright in this case), or via a subsidy/tax.
As for the movies, you can actually buy the right to watch the movie.
Like that makes any difference at all. Ever heard of Disney's "vault?"
Are you actually claiming that it's difficult to buy a Disney movie?
Plays are actually intended to be seen on a stage, not read. Doh.
Did you even read my quote in context? Someone was complaining about movie scripts never being available like how the scripts of plays traditionally have been available. However, the scripts of plays are the best substitute for what is intended to be a live performance. That's not the case for movies, so complaining about the lack of access to movie scripts seems silly.
I think that copyright terms are way too long, but I just don't get why so many people on Slashdot disregard all IP laws as being frivolous and/or useless.
I just don't get why so many people on Slashdot regard IP laws as being the only way to pay for the labor of creation when they are just as broken whether the term is 1 year or 1 millennium.
And despite your "20 years of studying copyright economics", I've yet to hear some new revolutionary idea from you for paying for the labor of creation.
Well, what's this alternative way for paying for the labor of creation.
Shakespeare did not get his career cut to a stop after the first few plays because all his works were derivatives of things of which some were written a very short time earlier. A lack of copyright saved him.
(This is ignoring the fact that I've already agreed to copyright terms being far too long.)
Regardless of that, do you have any examples?
Let's look at a few of his more famous plays.
Romeo and Juliet was based on Tristan and Iseult, a story from centuries before Shakespeare; it wouldn't be a problem even under the current absurd copyright length.
Hamlet was also based on a far older story. That's also ignoring that if you accept the Ur-Hamlet origin theory, Shakespeare's company bought the rights to the play, just like what would happen with the modern copyright system.
Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra; I can keep going. Shakespeare wasn't exactly plagiarizing the guy who wrote something ten years ago.
This also ignores the fact that copyright does not imply an inability to act as inspiration. Numerous fantasy works are panned as "rip-offs" of Tolkien. They aren't exactly getting sued by his estate, despite the copyright on his work still being in effect.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and for the mobile phone market, there's Atom.
Are Intel licensing that to other manufacturers for SOC use? No? Then it's not a real player; cutting the component count at the overall device level is more important than speed to phone makers, as it's cheaper for them like that.
Intel sells full fledged SoCs equivalent to Samsung's Exynos line, etc. with Atom cores. Sure ARM licenses cores, but they aren't even a fabeless chip company they're a processor IP company. They sell Nvidia, Samsung, MediaTek etc. the right right to use ARM IP in their SoCs, which are then fabricated by TSMC, GlobalFoundries etc. Of course Intel isn't going to license you their cores. They want to sell you an SoC they designed, not their IP. That's like saying Qualcomm isn't a real player in the SoC business because they didn't license the Krait core to anyone else.
In addition, on a more general note, comparing margins from fabless guys to Intel is always a bit disingenuous. Intel, being vertically integrated, gets to combine the margins of the foundry, core IP house, EDA guys, and final SoC integrator. Of course they'll have better gross margins.
Apple was pretty much the only company that could demand decoupled basebands at that time. As others have mentioned, there are other phones coming out know with standalone Qualcomm basebands. And that still doesn't account for the fact that baseband integration improves power efficiency (assuming everything else is equal, which is not always the case.)
As I said, nearly everyone uses Qualcomm's SoCs for their high end phones if they want LTE because Qualcomm has a near monopoly on LTE basebands. (Even the new Exynos based SIII's with LTE use a separate Qualcomm baseband.) It's almost always better for power efficiency if you have an integrated baseband. Until recently, Qualcomm would not sell you a separate LTE baseband, so if you wanted LTE you had to buy their SoC as well. (This was likely due to dedicating their stand-alone baseband supply to the iPhone5 ramp.)
Intel has some of it's processor design team in Israel. However, all their manufacturing R&D is done in Portland. All of their other fabs just duplicate the setup they create for each node in Portland. However, I don't think that Intel is in any danger of losing IP in Israel, (unlike the similar dangers that exist when manufacturing in east Asia.)
No it's because Qualcomm owns the LTE market. In order to sell a phone with LTE you have to buy a baseband from Qualcomm since they make the only capable LTE chips on the market. Qualcomm (i.e., it's foundries) have been capacity constrained for at least a year now so they can insist you buy their entire SoC with integrate LTE baseband if you want an LTE chip. (That's ignoring the fact that you usually have less power consumption if your baseband and SoC are on the same die.)
Intel has sent nothing overseas. Their manufacturing R&D is all done in Oregon, and most of their leading edge chips are made in Oregon and Arizona with fabs in Israel and Ireland as well. They have exactly one fab in China that makes 65nm products, which now just consists of some old chipsets.
Qualcomm manufacture ARM chips, like a dozen other companies, there is nothing special about them.
This is explicitly false. Qualcomm designed their own cores that implement the ARM instruction set. They did not license the Cortex A-x designs and glue them together (like every other ARM SoC vendor, including Samsung.) That also ignores the fact that they are the only ones making usable LTE basebands right now. Qualcomm right now is so dominant that if anything, they're the Intel of the mobile world.
Of course I should actually link to the random article. http://savolainen.wordpress.com/2011/09/ This article also has some more information, but less cool diagrams. http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4376121/Applied-tips-dielectric-etch-tool-for-3-D-NAND-production- Disclaimer: I work for Applied Materials (not for the etch division though).
This random article I found has good pictures. This new chamber will allow for precise etch control from layer to layer. It's already in place at customer sites for R&D. (No company usually announces these products without having some placements or at least earlier marketing.) No one really knows how soon 3D NAND is coming; it depends on exactly how low they can scale 2D NAND, which is limited by the number of electrons you can store in a floating gate. 3D NAND designs usually use a charge trapping dielectric layer instead of polysilicon to store charge, the layers are then stacked to allow multiple layers of storage. But to contact each layer separately, you will need to etch through each layer in a sort of staircase pattern, which requires really good control of the etch process.
Except Solyndra didn't actually outsource their manufacturing to China. They had millions of square feet of factory space in CA.
Caltech operates a federal lab, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and receives federal money to do so. The Institute ("Universtiy") is run from that source of funding.
Caltech is not run by money from from the federal government. JPL is run by Caltech using federal money. The chemistry (and other unreleated) labs on campus are not (at least not any more so than at any other university; pretty much every university in the country receives some source of funding from the federal government, through grants from thttp://science.slashdot.org/story/12/02/13/0331221/nasa-considers-privatizing-galex-astrophysics-satellite#he NSF, DOE, etc.)
AMD is a fabless company now. They contract out their manufacturing to their former fabs (including the one in Dresden), which is a separate company that they own ~10% of. That company is building a new fab in Saratoga County in NY. Their former Austin fab was spun off with their flash memory division as Spansion. It's no where close to being a leading edge fab. It still uses 200 mm wafers.
And being ahead of TSMC is arguable in any case.
AMD lost its fabs a while ago. (Their fabs are part of GlobalFoundries now, and they're a bit ahead of TSMC, but not anywhere close to Intel in terms of process capabilities.)
Really?! Then what is a government supposed to tax. Any economist will tell you that negative externalities are *exactly* what a government is supposed to tax and then use the money to subsidize positive externalities. The government is certainly not the most efficient body in the world, but I'd argue that compensating for externalities should be the government's first priority.
Trust me, Intel is so far ahead of everyone else in process technology, it's not even close. Yeah, someone else will eventually make FinFETs in production but by then I wouldn't be surprised to see Intel with transistors that have III-V and Ge channels. And lithography limitations are already resulting in very restricted design rules for design engineers. As they are pretty much the only vertically integrated company semiconductor company left, they'll have a rather large advantage in knowing exactly how to tune their designs to fit the limitations of their mask sets, etc.
One of the problems with open source hardware is that the highest performance chips are designed under restrictive design rules which are a result of fabrication process limitations at the smallest technology nodes. That's one of the biggest reasons the semiconductor industry hasn't moved entirely to a fabless model. The folks making high performance computing hardware need to know exactly what limitations are imposed upon them by the fabrication process. And the fabircation process will never become "open source" (at least not until Moore's law no longer works), there' just way too much money invested in process technology for it to be freely released.
This is nonsense (or at best an utterly pessimistic view on the value of Google). Let us assume that you currently possess $50 worth of tangible assets. Suppose I signed a contract with you saying that I had to give you $100 for your work on zoology 1 year from today. How much should someone be willing to pay you right now for all to all of your money for time immemorial? Assuming I am perfectly credit worthy, someone should give you ~$150 (actually slightly less accounting for inflation reducing the value of $100 in the future, rates of return on other risk free opportunities, etc.). Now suppose that this fictional investor has noticed that you seem to have been able to get me to sign this contract for $100 every year for the last 5 years. If you knew I was absolutely guaranteed to get $100 every year for the rest of time, and the rate of return+inflation on the best alternative risk-free investment was 7%, someone would be willing to pay 50+sum[100/(1+r)^n,{n,1,Infinity}]=$1478.57 for access to all of your money. Replace all these values on these contracts with the expected value of the profits of Google and the appropriate interest rate and then divide by the number of outstanding shares and you would get how much someone should be willing to pay for a share of Google's stock. The market comes into play by determining the expected value of Google's profits. If the price of Google is going up, it's because they think that the future profits of Google are higher than what the market currently thinks they are going to be. If it's going down then the opposite is true. Your valuation scheme is based on the idea that Google will make no profits in the future, which is so utterly pessimistic as to be silly.
Chances are you would be one of those people. There's an extremely good chance that some of your retirement savings are invested in some fund that owns shares in BP. Congratulations on your criminal record.
Great post. Furthermore, the law only prohibits these practices when they are undertaken for the purpose of injuring or destroying your competition. And in regards to the history, I'm pretty sure the law was initially drafted to prevent Asian suppliers of microchips from dumping them below cost in the US.
Sure, I accept that the toys are great, but scientifically? It's time wasted. At some point people are going to ask what did you accomplish?
If you're a mathematician especially, you'll have nothing to show for it, and if your reports ever get published in the future, they'll be long obsolete and irrelevant.
Who cares? You're getting paid to do what you love and are provided with all the toys you can think of to do that stuff with. If I was a mathematician, I wouldn't really consider that sort of job to be unfulfilling. (Ethical and moral dilemmas are another matter.)
Actually, I'm pretty sure porn went for HD-DVD. So it's not always the right indicator.
Do you know how many times Disney has claimed Snow White, Cinderella, etc. is being put in the vault forever?
You still can't understand the argument I'm making about plays and movies? A play is by definition a live performance. A video of the play is not equivalent, or else the play would be a movie. Many people believe that the closest we can get to that without putting on a live performance is a script. In the case of a movie, the video is the movie. No one thinks that a script of the movie is a better representation of it than the movie itself. However, some people do think that the script of a play is a better representation of a play that a video of it. Now do you understand my point?
As for your copyright alternative, you still refuse to actually say what it is. By the way, generally speaking, calling someone an ignoramus for disagreeing with something you haven't even brought up yet is a great way to conduct an argument.
Public goods are, by definition nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. Copyright is an attempt to negate both of those characteristics. You can't consistently say that copyright enables a public good because it tries to make it not a public good. You can't have it both ways simultaneously. Trust me, I'm pretty sure I know more about the economics of copyright than you do, been studying it for nearly 20 years now.
Really, studying it for 20 years? Then you'd know that the existence of externalities makes a market inefficient. The only two ways I've ever heard of for correcting for an externality is to artificially create a market for it (via copyright in this case), or via a subsidy/tax.
As for the movies, you can actually buy the right to watch the movie.
Like that makes any difference at all. Ever heard of Disney's "vault?"
Are you actually claiming that it's difficult to buy a Disney movie?
Plays are actually intended to be seen on a stage, not read. Doh.
Did you even read my quote in context? Someone was complaining about movie scripts never being available like how the scripts of plays traditionally have been available. However, the scripts of plays are the best substitute for what is intended to be a live performance. That's not the case for movies, so complaining about the lack of access to movie scripts seems silly.
I think that copyright terms are way too long, but I just don't get why so many people on Slashdot disregard all IP laws as being frivolous and/or useless.
I just don't get why so many people on Slashdot regard IP laws as being the only way to pay for the labor of creation when they are just as broken whether the term is 1 year or 1 millennium.
And despite your "20 years of studying copyright economics", I've yet to hear some new revolutionary idea from you for paying for the labor of creation.
Well, what's this alternative way for paying for the labor of creation.
Shakespeare did not get his career cut to a stop after the first few plays because all his works were derivatives of things of which some were written a very short time earlier. A lack of copyright saved him.
(This is ignoring the fact that I've already agreed to copyright terms being far too long.) Regardless of that, do you have any examples? Let's look at a few of his more famous plays. Romeo and Juliet was based on Tristan and Iseult, a story from centuries before Shakespeare; it wouldn't be a problem even under the current absurd copyright length. Hamlet was also based on a far older story. That's also ignoring that if you accept the Ur-Hamlet origin theory, Shakespeare's company bought the rights to the play, just like what would happen with the modern copyright system. Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra; I can keep going. Shakespeare wasn't exactly plagiarizing the guy who wrote something ten years ago. This also ignores the fact that copyright does not imply an inability to act as inspiration. Numerous fantasy works are panned as "rip-offs" of Tolkien. They aren't exactly getting sued by his estate, despite the copyright on his work still being in effect.