Cringely recently published: "The Decline and Fall of IBM" http://www.cringely.com/2014/06/04/decline-fall-ibm/
loc1366-69: THE HARDWARE PROBLEM: IBM’s hardware business has struggled the most recently, and turned in a big loss in 2013. Its difficulties are a direct result of Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law says that we expect technology to double in capability about every 18 months. There are many ways to spin this law, but the important one is from the customer’s perspective. The customer expects to get twice the value from the same amount of money every 18 months. ... snip ... incremental cost per wafer is relatively constant ... i.e. major motivation moving from 300mm wafers to larger 450mm wafers (more chips per wafer at same cost). going from 32nm technology, 300mm wafers to 14nm technology & 450nm wafers ... significantly increases the number of circuits per wafer. If you have 32nm chip and just move it to 14nm with same number of circuits/chip, you have smaller, faster, and more power-efficient chip. Moving at same time from 300mm to 450mm wafers means that there also are almost 12times as many smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips per wafer ... with large enough volume (that covers the upfront change-over costs) ... then the intel Moore's law model has fab producing 12times more smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips for the same cost (or per chip cost drops by factor of 12). If such a seismic shift were to be applied to ec12 ... in theory it would be going from $33M for max. configured ec12 @75BIPS to something like 100BIPS for possible only $3M. past posts in thread: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#2 Demonstrating Moore's law http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#4 Demonstrating Moore's law http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#5 Demonstrating Moore's law http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#6 Demonstrating Moore's law http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#7 Demonstrating Moore's law http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#8 Demonstrating Moore's law http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#9 Demonstrating Moore's law http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014h.html#10 Demonstrating Moore's law -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
