Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

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Slides from AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) event at the PC Cluster Consortium event in Osaka, Japan offer up details regarding the chip vendor’s roadmap for its GPUs and CPUs, with the takeaways including the launch of a 300W APU targeted at the HPC segment along with the launch of new CPU cores.

At the event, Junji Hayashi, Consumer and Commercial Business Lead at AMD Japan, shared details on the vendor’s K12 ARM as well as the x86 Zen CPU cores. AMD is looking to introduce both ARM as well as traditional x86 cores in a pin compatible platform that is codenamed SkyBridge. Aimed at the server, embedded, semi-custom and client markets, both the ARMv8 and the x86-powered cores will offer 64-bit computing and will be manufactured using a 14-nm FinFET process. SkyBridge will be launching before the end of the year, although an exact launch window was not provided.

The K12 core will feature Simultaneous Multi-Threading, which is a departure from the Clustered Multi-Thread technology that is currently utilized in AMD’s offerings. SMT will offer larger CPU cores the ability to achieve a higher throughput by allocating underutilized resources to an additional, slower, execution thread.

As for GPUs, Hayashi mentioned that AMD would be moving to a two-year release cadence cycle for updating the GPU architecture of APUs. There was also a mention of a High Performance Computing APU, which is said to be radically different from existing designs in that is features the Stacked HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) memory standard. The HPC APUs will slot in between the standard server cores and the FirePro line of cards.

The current generation HBM is nine times faster than GDDR5 memory and 128 times faster than DDR3. AMD is said to be utilizing the same standard in its Radeon 300 series, with the technology itself developed in collaboration with SK Hynix.

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Rumors refuse to die that Apple (NASDAQ:APPL) is considering dumping Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) silicon for ARM (LON: ARM), and Intel executives are forced to continue on their debunking offensive.

Apple first announced that Intel silicon would power its desktops and laptops in 2005. As ARM architecture matured throughout the later part of the decade and into the next, many vendors in the PC space have considered — and attempted with varying degrees of success — putting ARM based chips into their notebooks and desktops (think All-in-Ones not big towers).

Speaking to Business Insider late last week, Intel CFO Stacy Smith said that Intel is so far ahead of the competition that Apple simply couldn’t consider anyone else.

“For a customer like Apple you’d have to take a big step off performance to step off our architecture,” Smith said to Business Insider. “That is what in essence enables us to win across different customers.”

Even though rumors hold that Intel’s next-generation architecture, which Apple would be keenly interested in, is delayed Smith brushes off concerns that this might cause vendors to jump ship.

“Our leadership over the rest of the industry is extending. We’re not delayed relative to the industry. We’re actually ahead of the industry,” he continued.

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Lenovo (HKG:0992) is the largest PC vendor in the world, and by acquiring Motorola from Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and IBM’s (NYSE:IBM) server business, the Chinese manufacturer is looking to cement its position in the mobile and server segments.

At the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Lenovo’s chief executive Yang Yuanqing stated to the Wall Street Journal that the focus for 2015 would be to “pay more attention to the integration” of Motorola and IBM’s x86 server business, acquisitions that cost the Chinese vendor roughly $5 billion.

New markets

The acquisition of Motorola opens up a series of key markets to Lenovo. The Chinese manufacturer became the fourth largest smartphone manufacturer in the world late last year, with strong sales in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. In China, Lenovo is the second largest vendor after Xiaomi.

Lenovo will be mounting a more aggressive challenge to Xiaomi with the Motorola brand, whose products will be sold exclusively online. As Motorola will not be able to match the low price strategy followed by Xiaomi (barring a few handsets like the Moto G), it is possible Lenovo will offer customization as the differentiating factor. Lenovo’s advantage lies in the fact that it is one of the few manufacturers in the country with its own manufacturing facility. The vendor has already mentioned that it will be bringing Moto Maker to China, through which users in the country will be able to customize their handsets at a level that is not possible with any other manufacturer.

Motorola will begin selling three devices in China from next month, all of which offer 4G connectivity: There’s the Moto G LTE, Moto X and a Moto X Pro, which comes with a 6-inch QHD screen. All three handsets have their strong points. The Moto G will likely be positioned as an affordable LTE-enabled handset, while the Moto X is aimed at customers looking to customize their handsets. The Moto X Pro will be targeted at users looking for a high-end phablet. 

In the US, however, Lenovo has failed to make a dent in the smartphone market, a situation that is is looking to fix with the Motorola acquisition. Yuanqing said that Lenovo will not be selling its own-branded devices in the country, instead leveraging Motorola’s brand name. Similarly, in Latin American markets, where Motorola has a strong presence, Lenovo will continue to sell Motorola-branded devices. Lenovo is not looking to turn a profit with Motorola in the short term, with Yuanqing stating that it will likely be four to six quarters before the brand starts becoming profitable.

King of servers

After a year of scrutiny from regulators in China and the US, Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s (NYSE: IBM) x86 server business is now final, making the Chinese vendor the third largest in the global x86 server market. Lenovo is now in charge of the System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, x86-based Flex integrated systems, NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and their associated software. Lenovo will also become a reseller for IBM storage products.

IBM’s server division will be integrated within Lenovo’s enterprise business group as the brand looks to gain a sizable chunk of the $50 billion global server market. Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s PC business back in 2005 made the vendor the third largest in the segment, and in nine years the Chinese manufacturer has managed to reach the summit. It will be looking for a similar return with the x86 server business, and has set itself the target of becoming the number one vendor in the server market in five to seven years.

Yuanqing hasn’t shared details on how Lenovo intends to achieve this feat other than saying that it will work on making the business more efficient. The server business is touted as the driver for growth for vendor in the future, and as such Lenovo will be looking to make a revenue of $5 billion from the x86 server business in the first year, accounting for 15% of the vendor’s overall revenues. Lenovo will be going after the same companies it challenged in the PC segment, HP and Dell. Yuanqing said that Lenovo’s advantage comes from working in markets with razor-thin margins.

At the end of the day, the acquisitions are geared at diversifying Lenovo’s product offerings. A bulk of the vendor’s revenues is still generated from PC sales, but the vendor is now looking to move beyond one segment in a bid to become a global powerhouse. Lenovo succeeded in turning IBM’s ThinkPad line around after it acquired it in 2005, and the signs show that it may do just the same with Motorola and IBM’s server business.

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AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) announced late yesterday that Forrest Norrod, formerly Dell’s VP & GM for Server Platforms would be joining the company to take Lisa Su’s position which she had left vacant after ascending to the position of CEO. That puts him in charge of AMD’s entire Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom business unit (EESC) as well as managing all aspects of strategy, business management, engineering, and sales for AMD’s EESC business.

Forrest Norrod comes from over 10 years of working at Dell and having valuable enterprise and server experience, where AMD needs it most. What will be interesting to see is how he will help shape AMD’s future enterprise and server businesses in ways that will set them up for success, because as it stands right now they are in an awful place in terms of server market share and overall sales. Thankfully for Norrod, AMD is already building ARM server chips and shipping them to customers and is working on new ARM and x86 core IP as well, which should give him and his team even more ammunition, come 2016.

Forrest Norrod – AMD

The truth is that Norrod has a long road ahead of him and there’s no doubt that he’s a qualified person for the job, it also may result in AMD having a closer relationship with Dell and getting more AMD products inside of Dell’s own servers.

After all, AMD currently has quite a good relationship with HP, but that hasn’t been enough to get them serious amounts of enterprise design wins to the point where they could actually gain some market share. It is going to be a very big uphill climb, but it really seems like Su has picked the right man for the job and now we just have to see where it will go from here.

“Forrest is an industry veteran whose strong track record of establishing and growing businesses strengthens our leadership team. Forrest’s unique combination of engineering,” Su said in a press release about the new hire. “Business management and technical expertise at both the chip and system level make him ideally suited to lead AMD into an expanded set of markets where our differentiated technology assets provide a competitive advantage.”

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According to Gartner’s latest report on the PC market shipments and marketshare, the company is reporting that overall global PC shipments shrunk 0.5% year over year. However, if you look at the US and EMEA figures, you see that the US grew by a sizable 4.2% and Europe more than doubled that by growing a hefty 9.6%.

What this means is that even though the US and Europe, which are considered developed markets, saw significant growth, the losses in Asia and other global markets (Latin America and Africa) ate up all of those growths in shipments. Also, Gartner’s data does not include Chromebooks or non-x86 tablet PCs, which may even skew the US and EU PC market figures downward where we’re seeing a huge resurgence of Chromebooks.

As you can tell from Gartner’s PC Market table for the entire global market, Lenovo continues to see incredibly strong growth year over year mostly at the cost of ‘other’ PC market vendors who saw their shipments decreasee 15.5%. The reality is that the global PC market last quarter was effectively flat when compared to last year since 0.5% is almost within their margin of error. As such, any gains are very likely at the cost of some other competitor.

In the US, HP still continues to be the number one vendor in the PC market even though Dell seems to be catching up to them, showing the largest growth, a whopping 18.4% year over year. Apple also saw fairly good growth, meaning that their overall marketshare of the US PC market continues to grow. Toshiba was actually the only major vendor to see a significant decrease in shipments, which is very likely due to the fact that the company’s overall product line in the US is fairly weak. Globally, Toshiba is not even ranked top 5.

Europe is a fantastic story for the PC market and overall the top four vendors saw fantastic growth with HP seeing 14% growth while Lenovo and Acer both saw over 40% growth year over year. Even ASUS saw over 33% growth in the third quarter compared to last year, which bodes really well for the Asian manufacturers. In fact, the companies’ contraction in Asia is very likely offset by growth in Europe where ASPs are generally higher.

Overall, it appears as though the PC market is nowhere near finished and that tablets are not having the impact that many would have you believe. The developed markets have had their time with tablets and the saturation of tablets has pretty much reached its peak. The PC Market in Asia and other markets is either struggling due to reduced overall economic demand (like in China) or due to tablets still not having reached saturation levels that they have in the developed markets. If you consider that the developed markets are generally more profitable for most PC manufacturers (regardless of where they’re from) then most PC manufacturers will consider the third quarter a good one that could be better.

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Behind the emerging market of the Internet of Things are embedded processors. Without these chips, such as Intel’s Atom and Quark, there would simply be be no IoT.

On Wednesday in Taipei Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) hosted its IoT Asia Tour to showcase some of its IoT solutions from partners in order to give an idea to industry stakeholders where the ecosystem is going.

As a testament to the confidence that Intel has in the staying power of IoT, Philip Cronin, the company’s regional sales director for the Asia Pacific and Japan likened the rise of IoT to that of both cloud services and big data.

“Nobody is rejecting the concept of IoT,” Cronin said on stage during the event’s keynote.

To get a sense of how Intel’s embedded technology is driving the IoT — as Intel has been pushing IoT with some effort for over a year now — we sat down with Richard Dwyer, Intel’s VP and general manager of its embedded sales group, when he was in Taipei.

VR World: In the embedded space, how would you compare Intel’s efforts to those of ARM and AMD. What are Intel’s strengths?

Richard Dwyer: First and foremost, we are the preeminent microprocessor silicon manufacturer in the world — we’re pretty proud of it. We’ve made a number of investments over the past three-to-five years in assets that help us differentiate those transistors and microprocessors that we build in ways that go beyond what our competitors offer in the marketplace.

One of the things that I think is truly unique — it’s not just because we bought McAfee (now referred to as Intel Security) so we have 15 to 16 security workloads we can apply to different applications — but we have the ability to do hooks in the silicon with that software. We have Intel Security, we make the microprocessors, we create hooks that tightly couple that security environment with the software stack that sits on top of it. That’s a pretty unique offering and position. That allows us to do things like establishing root of trust and passing that root of trust up through the chain of command before the processor boots.

Another differentiation is having a common architecture from the very low end such as Quark all the way up the architectural stack to Xeon’s in the data center.  The common architecture creates code compatibility and scalability from device to cloud as well as enabling more secured system. Couple core expertise with the IP and the assets that we’ve acquired, such as Wind River, McAfee, Mashery, Aepona as well as internally developed IP from our SSG and labs R&D efforts, Intel is able to create significant value with integrated system up the stack, from devices to data center.

So, our strength and differentiation is based on our ability to take transistors and the assets that we’ve purchased — such as Wind River from an Operating System perspective, or a hypervisor — and couple those assets with the security-based IP we’ve acquired from McAfee as well as that we’ve acquired from our own research. We’ve created this offering that leverages the silicon technology all the way up the stack.

I think our strength is our strength. Period, full stop. We will continue to build assets and IP that differentiates us from the competition.

I don’t approach a customer that’s approaching other architectures — there are many other architectures. I go into the discussion first and foremost trying to understand what’s the problem the customer has, what’s the business and engineering issue we’re trying to solve, and then we have a discussion about what our strengths are. Our strengths are our strengths: I think they are formidable and we will continue to invest in them. But I’m not going to disparage the other guys.

VRW:You’ve mentioned before that the Internet of Things is happening first in Asia. Why is that?

RD: I think that Asia is an “IP incubation melting pot” of capability, intellect, and manufacturing that is unmatched in other places around the world.  There were 1000 people [at the Intel IoT event] today. This set of people create things. They create solutions: there were ISVs, SIs, hardware manufacturers… this melting pot of talent is what percolates and generates wonderful things.

That’s not to say that there is not innovation and invention in other parts of the world. But things happen and come to life first here. I think there is a desire for risk taking here. People are willing to take bets, and to run fast and run hard. It’s an exciting place to be because there is so much capability here.

VRW: For IoT to succeed — or any platform really — there needs to be open standards. The problem is, there are competing open standards (for example with wireless charging). In large IoT environments a certain degree of hardware and software agnosticism is required — which is the case for using open standards. What’s Intel doing to ensure that competing open standards do not hamper the development of IoT or provide an annoyance to end users?

RD: Our position is that we realize that we cannot do this on our own. We participate in industry consortia with other companies — the biggest companies in the world — so that the standards we are involved with and helping to define we aren’t doing alone. We have, for example, the Industrial Internet Consortium which has members that are the “who’s who”.

Our focus will be to continue to participate in consortia that has the best, brightest and biggest companies in the world so that the standards we are involved with become ubiquitous. So that we are able to deliver solutions that are interoperable, that are multi-vendor oriented. The only way we can describe how we’re doing that is name the consortia we’re involved in and those peers that sit on the consortia with us.

Open standards are always open, there just may be some differences. At the end of the day, it’s likely that one may win. Which one will win? I think the one that will win will be the one that has the most market momentum and mass behind it based on who’s participating — but that’s Rick’s opinion, not Intel speaking.

VRW: Thanks for your time.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Intel today announced that they would be partnering with Rockchip to launch a series of Android-focused mobile SoCs based on Intel’s SoFIA architecture which combines Intel’s x86 architecture with their own modem technology into a single SoC. This would include Intel providing Rockchip with quadcore SoCs running Intel’s own x86 architecture and modems. The SoFIA is essentially a culmination of all of Intel’s work in the mobile space  but lacks Intel’s own GPU IP because it utilizes Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR graphics architecture instead. Intel has traditionally used PowerVR graphics in their mobile chips for many years but as their desktop and laptop GPUs got better they started to expand into mobile. Also, the SoFIA chips will not benefit from Intel’s 22nm foundry advantage that they enjoy to promote as their ‘edge’ because it will be manufactured with TSMC instead. We don’t know who will be fabbing the SoFIA chips for Rockchip, but the truth is that Rockchip doesn’t really need Intel’s chips as they’ve successfully won large amounts of SoC design wins without Intel or x86.

In fact, Rockchip is very well known as one of ARM’s biggest partners, so Intel is clearly trying to send a message. As you can see all of Rockchip’s current designs are merely their own SOCs utilizingARM’s own various CPU designs ranging from an M3 all the way up to an ARM Cortex-A17, which is one of ARM’s newest SoCs. Intel and Rockchip are jointly announcing the 1H 2015 availability of this new quad-core SoFIA 3G chip, which increases the SoFIA family roadmap to 3 different products. The dual-core SoFIA 3G chip will come in the fourth quarter of this year, while the quad-core SoFIA 3G chip and dual-core SoFIA LTE chip will come in the first half of 2015. Intel and Rockchip haven’t released quad-core SoFIA 3G pricing qite yet, however they believe it to be price competitive and under their agreement Rockchip and Intel will sell this new part to OEMs and ODM into each company’s existing customer base.

Ultimately, I see this as Intel finding a new distribution channel for their mobile SoCs so that they can gain more design wins, even at the low-end. There’s no denying that SoFIA is designed for the ‘mainstream’ or ‘low cost’ and as a result, pushing such a chip through Rockchip’s channels seems like a logical move for Intel. I don’t necessarily foresee Rockchip doing much with this chip necessarily other than promoting it as an option to their already existing Chinese OEM and ODM customers. Rockchip isn’t necessarily a popular SoC outside of China, however so many whitelabel tablets and smartphones get made in China and sold outside to other markets that there’s a good chance you could spot a SoFIA-based Rockchip product in a tablet almost anywhere in the world. I simply believe this to be Intel widening their addressable customer base and nothing more, really. Some people seem to be confused by this connection of Rockchip and Intel, but if anything it should make ARM have to work harder for Rockchip’s business which I’m sure they’d like considering Mediatek, AllWinner and Qualcomm’s success.

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According to some of our sources within Intel, there will be a multitude of Intel mobile design wins being shown at Computex 2014 in Taipei many of which will be running on Android. This includes all of the chips that Intel launched back at Mobile World Congress 2014 in Barcelona where we covered Intel’s Merrifield launch. They even showed us one of their reference devices, which were quite prevalent at Computex to get an idea of what could be expected with Merrifield. Even though Mobile World Congress is generally accepted as the place to launch smartphone and tablet design wins, Intel’s product design cycle simply didn’t sync up.

Now, we were told that there would be about a dozen design wins with Intel’s latest and greatest SoCs, however we weren’t able to get exact brands on lock. Considering that this is Computex, I would definitely expect two of those companies to be ASUS and Acer, primarily because they’re the strongest in Taiwan in the tablet business and they are the two companies that are most known for working with Intel. We already know that we’re going to see some new products from ASUS at Computex, since they announce new products every year at Computex. The same goes for Acer, so we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for exactly which Intel SoCs get integrated into ASUS’ and Acer’s latest products and whether Intel has managed to get others to gravitate towards them as well.

It may be that we could see someone like HTC move towards Intel if they want to take advantage of Intel’s marketing push with their new SoCs, especially considering their financial situation. However, HTC still has yet to acknowledge any SoC suppliers outside of Qualcomm since they built the HTC One X+ almost 2 years ago with Nvidia’s Tegra 3.

Either way, we’ll be interested to see what these mobile devices will look like, as I highly expect to see new tablets and smartphones (likely phablets) and how successful they will be for both their manufacturer and Intel since Intel is still struggling to get themselves into the mobile space. Even with today’s Surface Pro 3 announcement, Intel is still struggling to really make a dent in the smartphone market and is making slow progress in the tablet market. Intel will have a multitude of events at Computex this year, and one of them includes an Intel Mobile & Personal Computing event. This event will have  Hermann Eul, Intel’s VP and GM of the Mobile and Communication Group, as well as  Kirk Skaugen, SVP and GM of the PC Client Group, co-hosting the event together in order to provide the latest details and plans from Intel and their partners to reinvent mobile communications and personal computing.

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There is just one question that keeps on flying around – with products such as Radeon 4800 series, current 7-series and upcoming 8-series chipset, platforms like Puma – why is this company so keen on invalidating engineering and marketing team’s efforts with continuous bickering and mistreatment of people that are the key drivers of progress in the company.

The original netbook... now, how exactly AMD missed to cash out on this one?

AMD is the company that launched netbook initiative with OLPC project, and then failed to lead and leave Intel with $200M extra revenue per quarter. But that’s just one example – second one is probably the automotive division, with Nvidia snapping lion’s share of upcoming high-tech interfaces inside cars – AMD was used in Ferrari’s F1 and road cars, but now Nvidia Tegra and GeForce 9 are the ones selected to power 3D interfaces inside numerous Mercs, Maseratis, Ferraris, Audis and soon, whole car lineup from VAG Group (Volkswagen, Audi, Seat, Skoda, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Bentley and of course, groups owner Porsche).
When Nvidia snaps up x86 license (from Transmeta?) and Intel comes out with Larrabee, things are looking gloomier for AMD than they are for Nvidia or Intel. Ultimately, there is just one question: why AMD is so desperately want to be the follower, instead of leader?
Personally, I am spending all of my resources to get my company going, and people that are now in the team stride towards nothing else but greatness, to be #1, to make the difference. Time will tell will we succeed or fail, but one thing is sure – we are not building a company looking to follow others. We’re building a company looking at what our target market needs and more importantly, wants. Thus sadly, AMD cannot be our role model – far from it.

P.S. Number of good people that left AMD since the acquisition of ATi: Dave Orton, Henri Richard, Lorenzo Martone, Andrzej Bania, Peter Edinger, Dave Everitt, Suzy Pruitt, Lars Weinand, Andrea Di Giovanni and many, many others.  There are still many bright and creative people that I am talking with, but sadly, the trend is just downwards, not upwards.

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