Jon Peddie Editorials

How big is your monitor? And how many do you have?

2012-05-11T17:43:26Z

There’s a lot of assumptions running around in this PC industry, based on hearsay and tidbits of data. We just finished running some tests on Nvidia’s new dual-GPU AIB, the GTX 690 (see p. 11). Nvidia wasn’t very happy with our first results, and told us we were being CPU-bound by doing the tests at HD. Aside from the counter-intuitive comments (after all, isn’t that exactly what a GPU is supposed to do—eliminate CPU limitations?), it also raises the question about what the potential buyers of this $999 AIB have on their desks. I suppose it is reasonable to expect that a limited production super-high-end AIB (e.g., Asus only made 1,000 of their killer Mars II dual GPU that sold for $1,500) would only be bought by users with big bucks and big screens.

We looked at three sources to see if we could get a comfortable feeling about monitor size in use.

We looked at Steam’s data. We contacted StatCounter Global Stats, who monitor browsers (for web developers) and sniff the systems behind them. And we checked with Futuremark.

The results are somewhere between interesting and amazing, and prove once again how fragile conclusions about the user base can be depending on your sample size and demographics.

Futuremark’s data, which is reported by users of their benchmarks, shows a steady increase in larger screen resolutions. Steam also shows a similar trend, as does StatCounter—but the resolutions differ widely.

Futuremark has a report from over 176,000 users (every month).

StatCounter uses javascript to obtain the screen resolution of the devices they track. Their screen resolution statistics specifically do not include mobile devices due to the vast array of different mobile screen resolutions. StatCounter reports that 1366 x 768 has become the most popular screen resolution worldwide, having overtaken 1024 x 768. We were surprised that 2560 x 1600 doesn’t even show up in the survey, which is probably due to the large sample base and the nature of the users.

Since the company began its tracking of screen resolutions in March 2009 as a free service to developers and other users, StatCounter reports that 1024 x 768 has been the dominant screen size globally on the web.

“The data reflects a continuing trend of users moving to larger screen resolution sizes,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “The screen resolution size people are using is a critical factor for developers when it comes to web design, particularly in the case of fixed-width web pages.”

In January 2012, StatCounter’s global sample of screens used for popular browsers consisted of more than 18.1 billion hits. The ten countries with the largest individual sample sizes are listed below:

4.4 billion – United States
1.1 billion – Turkey
925 million – India
893 million – Brazil
872 million – United Kingdom
657 million – Canada
568 million – Germany
516 million – Thailand
450 million – Spain
408 million – Italy

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All of this leads us to the conclusion that StatCounter represents the everyday user. Steam is used by a broad range of people, but they are all gamers. Futuremark, on the other hand, represents performance/enthusiast users. These are people who are comparing the performance of their machines against others to see if they can improve performance.

What about the kind of people who actually do go out and buy a dual-GPU monster AIB? What resolutions do they run anyway? Checking Futuremark’s database for users who had AMD Radeon HD 6990, the percentage of users running 2560 is much higher, about 7%, but 1080p is still the most common resolution with over half of the users running that. With GTX 590 added. Numbers are similar to Radeon HD 6990 users, but there are about a percentage point more users who run 2560-wide resolutions.

The bottom line is you can’t make conclusions about screen resolution without a lot of qualifications about the user.

I have new respect for EA–It didn’t come easily

2012-04-30T22:45:38Z

I started out the week trying to run some tests on few machines, something that is frustrating enough without unwanted or unexpected obstacles thrown in your way. When I tried to run Battlefield 3 on a laptop, I had to log into Origin first; annoying but not too much different from trying to run a Steam game. However, I was told I couldn’t run the game on the laptop, the reg code was already used

I fired off a WTF email to a few people and made sure it would get to folks at EA. EA reacted and we had a meeting a couple of days later in a coffee shop in SF. I went prepared to be told I was unqualified to breathe, let alone try and play an AAA FPS. But I was impressed with the response time, and the reach-out.

Everything I thought I knew was wrong.

It seems I was too fast. I out ran their server and it lost the credentials transfer—you can play a game you own on any machine you have access to. And the EA tech in our meeting, who I ended up liking a lot, took full responsibility for the server; and in real time, in Starbucks, rebuilt my account—impressive. His boss, or a boss, showed up a half hour later and apologized for EA failing to delight me. At first I thought it was yada yada and I half tuned out but he was not only sincere he made sense—he really was sorry because EA has been working on providing a customer delight interface, and I was a disappointing reminder they aren’t finished yet.

We had a long conversation. I learned a lot about the federation of EA, and how the management is trying to integrate the various tribes it has inherited and/or acquired. Just establishing a common lexicon is a major effort, and weaving in other companies’ interfaces, account management, QC, and relationships is almost Sisyphus-like endeavor. But what turned me around was the commitment the company has to doing it. The massive internal educational process EA has undertaken, and the zero tolerance top management has for indifference, lackadaisical, or bureaucratic behavior toward the customer. “Look,” the VP told me, “we are the easiest operation for the customer to opt out of —they just stop playing and don’t say good-bye.”

EA knows they’re not done, that they’ll never be done, they made big commitments, and already major changes; not the least of which was moving their call center back to the US (in Austin).

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A game should not be restricted to a machine, any more than a book is restricted to a bookcase, or a DVD to a player. Good books, movies, and games can be visited again and again. A good game should never end.

When I shut down my machine the other night after having re-played Battlefield 3 and Stalker, I realized that I felt like I had been visiting old friends, and even though I knew some of the things that were coming I was still surprised and enjoyed it—some games, Stalker for sure, will live forever, just like Bioshock, and if I could get it to play again, Fallout.

That’s the real measure of a game and its value for money. There’s a lot I’ve played and once was enough (the new Wolfenstein comes to mind, or the new Duke Nukem I couldn’t even begin to get interested in it was so stupid).

Its why we watch TV series and go back to sequels in movies—we like the story the characters. The video and film industries have learned this. Mad Men or The Wire, or any great series works by continuing to sell the same characters and situations to those who have come to love the story and the characters.

But if we are constrained to one game per machine, the game publishers can forget about loyalty and repeat business—EA gets this and are doing everything they can to keep the players happy.

The easy life; R&D is the key

2012-04-17T13:55:42Z

Of the great companies I've been fortunate enough to come into contact with, there is one common denominator: R&D investment.

Nvidia’s CEO made a comment in a meeting recently that no super computer company could (or ever did) match the R&D investment his firm makes. Former Cray manger and now Tesla CTO at Nvidia Steve Scott echoed those words. Meg Whitman who recently took over HP gets it—R&D is important and she’s raised the bar and the spending. HP used to one of the leaders in R&D and it looks like Whitman is going to try and restore that glory. (Though she has also said that she wants to be sure the R&D is directed to projects that will pay off. AMD, which has had its troubles, has never taken its foot off the R&D pedal and that has helped to keep the company going during its painful reorganizations. Intel certainly gets it, and has benefited from its R&D for decades, I think it’s safe to say they got where they are today because of their unrelenting investment in the future—the unknown, and unknowable future. Giants like IBM, Microsoft, GE and 3M are legendary about R&D investment, which is why they are giants. Qualcomm is another heavy hitter in R&D and look at their results. Qualcomm is an IP company that also makes parts. Other IP companies like ARM and Imagination Technologies are the leaders in R&D spending 34% and 44% respectfully. Google on the other hand spends a modest 13.6% on R&D; however, its R&D spending was $2.8 billion, $3.8 billion, and $5.2 billion in 2009, 2010, and 2011. At December 31, 2011, Google had 32,467 full-time employees, consisting of 11,665 in research and development—35%!

Life will get easier—is that a good thing?

As computing power approaches the singularity we use that power to examine ever larger fields of data, what is being called big data. Big data is three dimensional: it grows in item count (think of that as the Y axis), with time (X) and in accuracy or resolution (Z). As such it is a cubic data and processing load, but within that load riches lie.

Big data is in weather and oil deposit forecasting, medical statistical analysis and consumer tracking. In all these examinations we learn about behaviors, cause and effect, and get a peek at how to predict things; drug interaction, popularity of a color or style, thermal effects on weather, etc. It’s all good, right?

Maybe. Google recently announced it is consolidating the privacy policies for its products; it has 60 or so such products. That is a lot of data, the epitome of big data—lotsa big data. And through its relentless efforts and consolidation Google has (or will have) created the most significant database ever. The combined aggregation of all that data will give Google the ability to correlate and analyze behaviors and activities, our physical locations, the timelines for the processes of conducting our lives, our actions, our aspirations, and Google can even make a very sophisticated guess about our thoughts; assuming of course it has the compute horsepower to do it. Google is just the first; governments have been trying to do this for decades.

At once, upon reading this a lot of you will yell Big Brother, and in fact it is. Google has accomplished what governments and dictators could only dream about. Google however, unlike a government, won’t pass laws or send in troops based on the analysis of the data. Rather it will use the data to guide the purveyors of goods and services. The result will be those purveyors will fine-tune their offerings so they perfectly match our desires—not necessarily our needs—our desires because we spend most freely on a desire, before a need.

The brave new world illustrated in the Minority Report, when Tom Cruise walks into a store and is recognized and directed to the things the store’s computer thinks he’ll want will soon be here. How we are ID’ed by the store may be through eye recognition like the immigration kiosks now do, but more likely it will be via NFC which we will all have in a year or so.

The question is, will this be a bad thing? It sure will cut down on bad product investments. But overall the wisdom of the crowd may not be what we want, and I’m pretty sure it's not what we need.

If the suppliers of goods and services only offer us what the masses want, then will Baskin-Robbins cut down to three flavors? Will clothes come in black, white, and pink? Will all cars look the same (most do now I’ll admit), and will we all eat the same food, or have to pay 3 to 5x to get something different?

That’s the down side of the singularity. Not that we will be oppressed by a mindless and selfish government, but that we will oppress ourselves by homogenizing our tastes and desires. The second phase of that dank world is the Lord of the Flies where we ostracize those who don’t fit in to our homogenized world. Who wants to see someone wearing green when everyone knows yellow is the in color? Get rid of that fool, he’s hurting my eyes.

Google may, in this gigantic database consolidation, unintentionally violate their first rule: do no harm. They could in fact do great harm—inadvertently, but then, who would know? It’s all good right? You like vanilla ice cream and pink shirts, right?.

Moore’s Law, it ain’t just for the rich–Or is it?

2012-03-29T23:48:39Z

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Mopping up; that’s what we used to call it when we would go to the next process size and integrate some of the peripheral components. It was also called jellybean removal. Companies like National, ST-Micro, TI, and SMSC hated it because every time there a mop-up they lost business for some jelly beans.

Recently Microsoft did it in the Xbox 360, taking the Power PC, the ATI Xeonos from 65nm to one SoC in 45nm. In the process they eliminated a power consuming front-side bus, and lowered cost and power consumption.

Also in the near past Intel combined the GPU and CPU die in their multi-chip Arrandale into one chip and introduced the Sandy Bridge. All of a sudden the historical evolution of process density of the so called Moore’s Law seemed new and grave new predictions were made about adjacent components being mopped up. Little things like a three-billion transistor GPU. What is missed in these forecasts of doom for the adjacent devices is an understanding of the trajectory of development of the adjacent device and the mopped up device(s).

When Microsoft made their super SoC it was a logical and smart, and difficult thing to do. Microsoft did the right things, but they could only do the right things because they were designing for a static (performance-wise) game console. One of the main attractions to the lazy game developers and publisher of the console is that it doesn’t change, it delivers the same MIPS and FLOPS in 2012 as it did in 2002. Many game developers love that because they don’t have to invest in new software tools or learn anything new – the performance stays flat, their costs stay flat.

So mop up works really well in that situation. However, if the platform is evolutionary then the mopper-upper has to be Solomon like a balance the mopping up with performance improvement. The mopper-upper shouldn’t love one child more than the other, but, cultures being what they are in organizations, they do love one child more than the other. In the case of Intel, they love their x86 child more than their GPU child (which has often been cruelly described as stunted in its growth). AMD on the other hand loves tier GPU chip more than their x86 child (which has been scornfully referred to as a weakling).

In the astonishing mobile market the mopper-uppers were at it a decade ago and almost invented the term SoC. Those companies, like Apple, TI, Qualcomm, and others have been pretty balanced in their efforts moving the GPU along about as fast as the CPU, if not faster. Part of the reason for that is they don’t have a technologic culture, they are buyers of technology getting the CPU IP from one company and usually the GPU IP from another. In the case of Qualcomm and Nvidia where they have their own internally developed GPU IP, they do tend to be a bit more biased toward the GPU. In the case of TI and Qualcomm, they also have a bit of a bias for DSPs.

But regardless of one’s bias to do mopping up you have to have the mop, and the bucket, and soap and all the other stuff. In the semiconductor biz those things are simulators, design tools, debuggers and compliers, oh, and a fab that can build the work of art they produce. That stuff ain’t cheap. In fact it’s so expensive it becomes one of the primary barriers of entry to a market. The other barrier is the mopper-upper him - or herself – the designers. SoC (i.e., mop up) designers aren’t standing on street corners waving at pickup trucks looking for day jobs. And they aren’t cheap— rare things seldom are.

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So it’s an expensive proposition to be in the game, unforgiving, unrelenting, and uncheap—mopping up isn’t for poor companies. That’s why the little ones like Matrox and VIA don’t do it. They also do not manufacture in the latest process because of the associated costs and talent needs. The irony is the poor companies freeze their designs because of expense and fight against downward price pressure, while a rich company like Microsoft mops up to reduce costs. And the other rich companies like AMD, Apple, Intel, TI, and Qualcomm mop up to keep on the technology curve.

ASIC suppliers like AM D (ATI) and Nvidia mop up very little but push the process curve, often a half step ahead of the CPU suppliers. Possibly the last major mop up by the GPU suppliers was the integration of the RAMDAC. Most of the changes made by the GPU suppliers is in the architectural design.

And all of those things are expensive, so maybe Moore’s law really is just for the rich. Maybe that’s why the most of the new companies are either IP or software companies.

Waiting for the inevitable? No company is too big to fail, not even Apple

2012-03-16T14:26:49Z

How long do you think it will take for Huaweai to overtake Qualcomm, TI, Nvidia, or ST-Ericsson? How long before ZTE to surpass Alcatel-Lucent, Alvarion, or Cisco? Or how long will take for Samsung to overtake Apple? Is it inevitable, or is such speculation just doomsday talk? Remember when we thought DoCoMo would take over the world? Or Samsung surpass Intel? Can growth rate be a reliable predictor of the future? Not very often, but it is tempting to accept the intercept points as inevitable; and in the case of notebooks and desktops the prediction (based on the curves) was correct. But there’s always that black swan lurking around the corner, isn’t there?

However, in the case of the Chinese government sponsored companies the rules of predictive forecasting get bent. Governments and sovereign funds (like ATIC of Abu Dhabi, which is GlobalFoundries investor) have long horizons and aren’t scared off with a bad quarter or two or three or more if the goal is what they believe in and want. Publically held companies that have to answer to intolerant investors or dividend collectors have to hit the mark every quarter, and if a long range outlay is needed (like a multi-billion dollar fab) then the company better make sure it’s got the cash flow and cash reserves to support such an investment.

Some companies with patient investors, like Kodak, Philips, and Nokia have found you need more than just a polite BOD—you need a good plan based on real market information and not just tweaks of the last game plan. If anything good came out of the economic meltdown the unregulated banking speculators brought the world, it was the realization that too big to fail is a lie. It’s the emperor’s new clothes. How big do you have to be not to be able to fail? Would Greece be big enough, or Spain?

Information and knowing when and how to react to it are of course the key. But usually (if not always) the vested short-term interests of the people empowered to do something about it block the decision making for the common good.

Usually when a company is in trouble it looks to the courts to remedy the situation, or protect it from the inevitable that its management refuses to acknowledge or do anything about. IP protection is the first step. Sometimes it works, most of the time it’s a delaying action that just keeps the lawyers well supplied with expensive suits, cars, and houses. Imagine what might be accomplished if the company invested all that legal money into R&D. But then to do that you’d have to have a plan and a vision—what should you be R and D’ing? Certainly not anything that’s going to jeopardize the status quo and so management turns to lawyers.

And that leads us back to the question, how long do you think it will take for Samsung to overtake Apple? No doubt about it Apple is at the top of its game, and it has a following other companies can only fantasize about. But what can it do next? Build a TV, go into game console market, manufacture electric cars? When you’re sitting on the biggest pile of corporate cash in the world, and your market cap is bigger than that of most countries, your next trick had better be a bold outrageous idea or your crown will slip off faster than a starlet’s garment malfunction.

Is Apple too big to fail? Not likely.

One way companies maintain their growth is when they’ve just about wrung out all the juice that’s left in their key market is to go on an acquisition binge. Sometimes that works, most of the time it doesn’t. It kind of kept Broadcom alive, but with the possible exception of Infineon, it hasn’t helped Intel much. The other choice is consolidation as Renesas and its component companies have tried, and as ST-Ericsson is trying. Neither looks too promising.

So what’s Apple going to do to keep its staggering PE where it is? And here’s a wild idea, what if the management at Apple doesn’t care where or what the PE is? Is that a possibility? Seriously, how many of the senior managers seeing their net worth go up daily from their stock holdings or options would do (or not do) anything that would jeopardize that?

Apple has been amazingly good about keeping its plans a secret. That has worked well for the company, kept the mystery to add to its cachet, and blind-sided all the shorters who have tried to divine the company’s plans. If we give the company the benefit of the doubt, another rabbit will be pulled out of the hat this time next year. But what if the management at Infinite Loop are running through the halls as if their hair was on fire screaming—where’s the next trick? Wow, that could be a bigger crash than 2008, and who all would they take down with them?

The undocumented danger of Imagination deficit disorder

2012-03-02T01:15:20Z

Im·ag·i·na·tion—noun, the faculty of imagining or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.

The single thing that separates the losers from the winners, besides dumb blind luck, is imagination. Some call it vision; others hard work, but the truth is the companies that died, did so because the CEO and his or her lieutenants just didn’t have enough, or maybe any imagination.

You’ve all heard the dumb things some great people have said —there’s only a market for maybe 100 computers, 64kB should be enough, and there’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home. Now in these cases two of the CEOs overcame their imagination deficient and went on to do great things. And ironically in the case of the third he had a history of imagination and bravery—launching VAX and StrongARM. But down the road from DEC was Wang Labs which started with the most imaginative personal calculator, grew to a giant company only to fail to imagine a world without big centrally controlled word processors. So many of the greats of the seventies and eighties failed when the circumstances changed—they couldn’t imagine a way out, the next step, something else to do and so they just road it down till it died.

Imagination – the ability to face and resolve difficulties; resourcefulness: a job that requires imagination.

And sometimes a CEO’s imagined imagination can put a company into a tail spin. There was SGI’s McCracken’s decision to buy Cray, followed by Rick Belluzzo’s disastrous announcement that SGI was out of the workstation business. And who can forget Leo the Lip Apotheker’s declaration that HP was going to dump the PC business? And turn into something like IBM. Those guys couldn’t imagine the consequences of their statements and actions. In the case of Apotheker, he was working from the playbook he brought with him from SAP.

When a company fails, fails to grow or fails completely and disappears, it’s attributed to a series of bad management decisions, or bad luck due to circumstantial situations, but that’s just baloney, a polite excuse. That fact is the CEOs had an imagination deficit disorder, they had IDD.

Imagination deficit is the cause of failure to launch, those without imagination simply can’t think of what to do next, or to do instead. Imagination is different than belief because what is personally invented by the mind does not necessarily affect the course of action taken in the apparently shared world, while beliefs are part of what one holds as truths about both the shared and personal worlds. Beliefs can be crippling.

And what about those companies that have imagination? Well Apple comes easily to mind, and Nvidia and HP, to name just a few. Sony used to have it, and I think still does if they could get their left foot off their right.

Imagination requires one to disconnect themselves from fear: Fear of change, fear of failure, fear of stock price decline.

How do you get it? How does a CEO get imagination, can you buy some on eBay? Well the really smart CEOs don’t have all the imagination, maybe the least—or the most. The CEO’s imagination may be to let all the smart clever people working for her or him to express their imaginations, and then maybe doing it. And the IDD CEO is the one who stifles, and dampens that imagination. He can’t see it, can’t get it, so it’s no good. He’s wearing plaid and can’t understand this stupid idea about micro-fibers.

The SciFi community has a great track record on imagination. Look at all the stuff that came out of Star Trek in the 70s and is part of our lives now and still not all of it realized—but imaginable. The dark side of that model is the apocalyptic movies; don’t think I want to live in a place like Blade Runner, or The Matrix.

Me, I don’t know anything about imagination, but I know it when I see it—and so do you.

Inflection points—they really do happen

2012-02-16T19:31:43Z

Andy Grove is credited with applying the term inflection point to business. In his book Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove said that Inflection Points provide huge strategic advantages to the companies capable of moving on them. Intel has continued to embrace the strategy and everyone else would like to. Today, everyone uses the term inflection point as if they invented it. Most of the time when you hear some marketing or PR flak toss out the “I” word you roll your eyes up and think, oh boy here we go again—stop the revolution, I want to get off.

And anytime a inflection point is identified or pointed out, various pundits, arm-chair historians, and wannabe quoted bloggers remind us that an earlier version or attempt was made .... back in the day (and while I’m ranting, why did we adopt this incredibly silly cliché?).

So saying that when Steve Jobs stood up and announced the iPad was an inflection point, inevitably invites historians to point out that we’ve had “tablets” since the late 1990s. Well that’s just fine, but it doesn’t change the reality that Jobs did create an inflection point. He certainly did as we are all aware.

Tablets, especially the iPad, changed the usage model, just as the iPhone did. The drive for lighter notebooks begat the Air, and Utlrabook, and now the UltraThin from AMD. And the iPad and its imitators have taken a whack out of the notebook market, most notably the netbook segment.

Likewise, Ultrabooks and Thins are taking a whack out of notebooks and the net result is the whole damn market, especially the mobile market will never be the same.

Now if you happen to be in a company that can’t adapt to this change, then go peacefully into the night Mr. Dinosaur and begin the process of becoming an oil pool. Lots of companies will be in that situation, component suppliers, whitebox suppliers, and laggard PC suppliers.

The other undeniable inflection point is the rate of growth in PC and mobile device consumption by the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries. These counties have large populations that have a rapidly developing middle class (something the US used to have) and aspirational appetites for new things.

Ironically, the companies that don’t have bragging rights in the tablet or smartphone market are using the growth in the BRIC countries to brag about. But, what if BRIC started buying tablets? OMG! Well then the spin doctors would have to find something else—the cloud maybe—oops another inflection point that cloud thing is, isn’t it? The cloud threatens to put the game console companies out of business, but then so do the tablet suppliers.

So the winning company, the company to invest in now is the one that talks about tablets, BRIC, and cloud. No, not just talking, all the companies even remotely connected to the market are talking about those things in one combination or another. The companies to invest in would be the ones that are actually shipping tablets to the BRIC countries for use with the cloud. Oh wait—there aren’t very many.

But there are some, and there will be more very soon, and since we can’t give any forward looking statements we can’t disclose who they are, but as the dodge-ball-playing marketing types like to say, stay tuned (another despised cliché).

The bottom line here is that we are at a couple of inflection points. And when there is such a situation there will be chaos. And when there is chaos fortunes are made (and lost).

AN INFLECTION point is a point on a curve a which the curvature or concavity changes sign. In other words the squiggle changes direction and if you're lucky you're there with your products to make the turn.

The other thing to keep in mind is the cost of entry is not small. You don’t just suddenly wake up one day and decide you are going to market and sell in to BRIC, or that you are going to build a tablet, or develop a cloud strategy or solution. Therefore, if you come across a company that has just discovered an inflection point that others have been talking about and planning for, short the newbee. The chances of them catching up and doing something novel (other than price cutting) is slight and probably their exit scenario.

And even though Apple and Microsoft be late into some markets, it wasn’t because they weren’t studying them. They watched what everyone else had done wrong and they did it differently—they have made their fortunes by being the latebees – latebees who started planning when the inflection point was first sensed.

AS CES goeth, so goeth the industry

2012-02-03T19:51:46Z

For those of you who went to CES this year, you should have recovered by now. And if you suffered through 2011, you should be seeing some little rays of sunshine and hope for the on-coming year. And if you accept my premise about CES being a leading indicator, then you should feel pretty good about 2012.

I first proposed CES as a leading indicator about eight or nine years ago. If you look at the following chart which covers the past ten years you can see definite correlations.

What I think the data really represents is the manufacturers and dealers long-range vision, and the adjustment they make (on costs) in anticipation of it. I think the suppliers to the CE industry see order rates dropping and then cut back on expenses. That cause fewer people to go to conferences, and when the picture looks brighter, they want to be at the head of the pack and rush back to CES. Also, the suppliers will typically do massive product rework and development during the down times so they will be in a position to capitalize on the upswing—and what better place to show your stuff than at CES.

However, we may have a natural barrier, just like the one we may be facing with Moore’s Law. As extraordinary as Las Vegas is, it does have an entropic limit and can’t expand forever (although there is still lot empty lots in the town.) There were one hundred and fifty-three thousand people squeezed into the taxi queues, restaurants, and hotels, and they were all very hard to avoid if you were trying to get from point A to B. The monorail was jammed packed, the buses had lines that extended the length of the Convention Center, and if you didn’t make a reservation at a restaurant long ago, it’s a the hotel or a big Mac for you.

CES is ridiculously large, and difficult to navigate. The booth addressing system is absurd and illogical, and the whole experience is unpleasant. That pain and suffering is offset by the surprises that can be found there, the opportunity to see clients you haven’t touched for a few months, and the stories. In general, the keynotes are a total waste of time, especially since you can watch them on YouTube almost in real time.

It’s a mixed message of a show. There are technology companies like ARM, Imagination, MIPS, and Vivante selling to component builders like Freescale, Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm, who in turn are trying to sell to device builders like HTC, LG, Motorola, and Sony, who are trying to sell to dealers and distributors like BillyJoe’s TV Shoppee and Best Buy. But BillyJoe wanders into Nvidia’s stand, and Qualcomm wanders into Best Buy, and others just wander, often in a circle trying to figure it all out.

It is in every sense of the word a bazaar, and with almost the same degree of organization as the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul—spices in one section, leather goods over there, rugs to the left.

CES needs to be broken up. The exhibitors would appreciate it, the city’s infrastructure would appreciate it, the attendees would appreciate it, and the city’s taxes and retail turn-over would be greater.

If CES Auto was one day and it was one I missed, how would that impact me? Not a bit. And if it was important for me to see cars with seven 20-inch woofers and chrome plated DVD players, then I’d do that. Do I really need to see iPod covers, stainless steel microphones (one can only wonder why they are needed), or whatever those things over in the corner of the north hall are?

And then there is the rat population consideration—at a critical density, wars break out among rats. Are a bunch of stressed out, hung over, trade show delegates that different?

It is possible density-dependent checks on population growth through intraspecific competition will not only reduce the number exhibitors to CES, but that as in most populations when intraspecific competition manifests, the population never recovers to its original size. Anyone remember Comdex? Anyone miss it?

So CES should head off this catastrophe and divide and conquer. Multiple smaller CES’s would be much more profitable for CEA, Las Vegas, and the exhibitors. The taxi drivers and restaurant help would like it too.

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The morning after pill

2012-01-12T15:31:59Z

Did you ever wake up the morning after having had too much fun the night before and wonder if anyone got the license plate of the truck that ran over you? Everyone has, even if they won’t admit it.

Well 2011 was like that for a lot of folks. After the melt down in 2009, 2011 was a lot like stone skipping only to end up with a deadening and disappointing plop. I haven’t heard anyone say they’ll miss it.

It’s been wose than partying all year and then having to pay the piper. Instead, it was a kind of okay year until it wasn’t and we still get the hangover.

The good news? Well, growth managed to stay positive, even if only low single digit.

In other news, Disk drives took a dive; they got soaked in the Indonsian floods, and that had a ripple effect. Flash drives, the obvious replacement choice, are still too expensive and there’s not enough supply to fill the spinner’s void.

Major new GPU releases were also kind of MIA, with no major announcements, and the ones that get introduced got a ho-hum reception from stressed-out and consumption-weary buyers. Even if the disk supply chain hadn’t dried up, or rather gotten soaked, and the processors were just more of the same, it’s unlikely the consumers or enterprise were going to go on a spending spree. There was just too much depressing news about the economy worldwide.

Who can get enthusiastic about a new 60-inch 3D TV with that kind of a background? Certainly not investors or VCs. The IPO market all but vanished in 2011, and share prices on the established companies got whip-sawed by panic from the European crises compounded by too few traders using too many computers to make trades that kept the stock market on a roller coaster ride.

And now it’s the morning of 2012. The stock market is up. CES is in full swing, and folks in general seem in good, if shaken spirits. There were some hard lessons learned in 2011. For one thing the vulnerability of concentrated sources in the supply chain has been exposed (again), as the Foxcon fire and the Earthquake/Tsunami in Japan did before.

Manufacturers are taking a hard look at their supply lines. Especially manufacturers in Japan. This isn’t the first time natural disasters have affected Japan’s plants.

On the other hand, in some markets there might be a lot of talk and no real change. The capital investment needed for some kinds of manufacturing can be pretty challenging. Those who would stop up have to meet the volume demands and that takes money. Unfortunately, the capital markets are in the bomb shelters right now. They don’t know what to do. In many cases, they’re not doing anything. Since no second source mega-sized suppliers are going to show up in the near future, manufacturers will just tip-toe around this issue and pretend it didn’t happen—you know, morning after behavior.

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What the industry needs is a morning after pill. The over dependency on New and Improved needs to be thought out ... again. The ridiculous bragging about Brazil and China’s explosive growth needs to be tempered with reality—they’re still not big enough to replace the loss of the US or Europe as growth markets. But you know how it is when you’ve had one too many: reason and fear fade away and bravado takes hold—you think you’re better than you are. And then either someone shows you you’re not, or you wake up and say, what the hell was I thinking of?

In 2011 we weren’t as smart, powerful, fast, or clever as we thought we were or could be.

Now we move into 2012 and Ultrabooks, smartphones, and tablets are our new shiny things. The things that will inject adrenaline into the industry, wake up the consumers, and maybe even cause the overly cautious enterprise to buy something other than servers and talk about the cloud. Not likely, but we can hope.

I’m looking forward to NFC and never having to put a card into a turnstile, or an ATM—“It’s me, don’t you recognize me? Don’t make me take out my wallet you stupid machine.”

Everyone knows I’m really looking forward to S3D. I may never leave home again.

And, as you read in this issue, we’ve been having a lot of fun playing with our new toys.

So the morning after has promise, as all mornings usually do. Let’s celebrate the new year, CES, and the splendors’ of the modern age.

Happy New Year!

The Last Editorial of 2011

2011-12-27T20:42:11Z

It’s been quite a year for all the computer segments from mobile phones and tablets to game consoles, PCs, servers, and supercomputers. Mobile phones with two and four cores running at a GHz or higher were introduced during the year, tablets and phones got thinner, phones got bigger and they got higher resolution displays and full HD capability. Game consoles got S3D, and PCs got thin and light notebooks, all-in-one desktops and killer powerful game machines. Servers got four to sixteen core processors, GPU-compute sub-systems, and Japan’s K Computer hit 10.5 PetaFLOPS and Oak Ridge said their Titan will exceed 20 petaflops, maybe even hit 30 putting exaFLOPS in the sights of super computer builders.

AMD introduced the A8 APU, ARM rolled out the Mali T658 GPU and unveiled its 64bit architecture V8, Freescale showed the iMX6, Intel started shipping Medfield and Oaktrail and introduced Tri-gate at 22nm, Nvidia introduced Kal-El, said they’d develop an ARM based server chip named after the mile high city and would build an SoC with a modem in it, Qualcomm brought the A-series Snapdragons, while Samsung announced the Exynos processor.

Other highlights of the year

DMP went public.

HP went nuts, got in and then out of the tablet market, got out and back in the PC market, hired fired and hired a CEO.

Lenovo went to Germany and bought electronics retailer Medion AG and soared to number two in market share.

Nvidia went to the UK and bought modem designer Icera.

Qualcomm went straight up and climbed to number one in market share while TI slipped badly.

Nokia and RIM went down down down and almost ran out of bullets shooting themselves in the foot. RIM was declared the winner managing to shoot off all its toes.

Intel got jilted by Nokia who thought Microsoft was prettier—and richer.

In a bodacious move Google acquires Motorola.

Khronos introduced WebGL only to have Apple and others tell them to go away we’ll use HTML5 if you don’t mind.

HTC gets bitch slapped by Apple and buys Dashwire and S3 to protect itself. Judge doesn’t buy it—fail.

Apple sucker punches Samsung shutting down its export machine.

Intel and Logitech quit GoogleTV and look for new adventures.

What a year

Are we finished yet? 2011 was a test like no other year with the possible exception of 2009—and yeah they most certainly are related.

The stock market, highly manipulated by computer trading and clever algorithms (from the same folks who brought us the recession) has swung up and down daily on news from Europe or the US’s do nothing but backbite Congress, impacting 401s and consumer’s sense of security. You can’t get out of a recession in the US without the consumer buying engine, and they’re not going to start maxing out their credit cards until the roller coaster rides stop. Magic won’t happen at the click of midnight no matter what time zone you’re in. But at least you’ll be able to laugh, have a drink, and be happy for a little while.

Happy holidays and hopefully happy New Year

What’cha get me for Christmas?

2011-12-11T17:34:24Z

In the US there is a shark-like feeding frenzy just after our stuff-yourself-till-you-bust national holiday to celebrate the pagan Indians teaching the Protestants how to grow corn. They were thankful for the lesson and so they declared the day Thanksgiving, a holiday, they ate the corn, and as fable has it, wild turkey. That was before Best-buy, Costco, and Walmart. For reasons unknown the day of shop-till-you-drop has been named Black Friday and is the leading indicator of the holiday shopping volume. Holiday shopping in the US accounts for about 40% of a retailers annual sales, and so if its flat or down (relative to the previous year) it’s considered a disaster, and Chicken Little comes running out of the accounting rooms of all the major chains. The always-clever stock market dumps all the shares of retailers and their suppliers and starts investing in derivatives because they understand those things.

Being out of work, or worried about the possibility of losing your job tends to kill the frenzied shopping mood, and so the bonus driven market watchers had their telescopes tightly focused on front doors of the retailers looking for people coming out carry stuff. They were relieved when they saw 60-inch HDTVs in shopping carts, piles of stuffed animals, Xboxes, and coffee makers. The holiday shopping madness was going to be good, the consumers, even those without jobs, were back buying stuff they didn’t need with money they didn’t have—we’re saved.

Also in those shopping carts were tablets, big ones little ones, some as small as a phones—wait, those were phones. Life in the US is tough. With an economy based on consumer consumption, little to no manufacturing base, and giant corporate farms we’re fragile. We’re controlled by the consumer, and she can be a fickle master.

But not to worry–she likes tablets, and always has liked mobile phones, the smarter the better. It used to be automobiles were the big consumer item in the US; not any more. TVs had the crown for a while, quite a while. And PCs were always a favorite. But tablets, in the era of Facebook and YouTube, boy oh boy what a delicious treat that is.

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So you can expect to see lots of tablets under the Christmas tree this year. And they will be well received and welcome. This isn’t that stupid looking coat your husband/wife/mom bought for you, or that indescribable fruits/meat dish wrapped in holly with gingersnaps on the outside. Nosiree, this something you want.

Here’s a prediction, on Christmas day in the US the 3G network is taken to its knees as everyone sends and receives gizillions of megabytes of video to each other, or watches football games or American Idol on their new tablets.

The Grinch that stole Christmas got chased out of town by the tablet that won the west, east, north and south. And think of those unfortunate ones who don’t get a tablet for Christmas, either given to them by a loved one or given to them by themselves. Think how disappointed they’re going to be. Think how envious they’re going to be when they go visit or friends come over and show off their new tablets. What could you show and tell about to match it? Your new sweater, the chrome-plated weenie roaster, or the 26-piece tool set you got? Nope, just doesn’t stand up to a tablet.

But you’ll show ‘em. Next year you’ll get a tablet that does 3D, AR, VR, and drives your car. Then who will have the last laugh?

Sometimes a tablet is just a tablet

2011-11-18T19:34:32Z

In the past month and half we have visited three major CAD company conferences in various parts of the world, plus a dozen clients and you want to know what we found? Tablets. Mostly iPads but that’s only because it was the only choice when these companies and clients took it up.

All the execs had one (except the CEO of course because as everyone knows CEOs don’t do any real work). The tablets were being used to show design concepts, power point presentations, photos, and AR. Audience members were even using them as cameras.

In the not too distant past, these activities would have been done on a laptop—a notebook. Does the similarity in names—notebook, tablet, strike you as a coincidence or logical progression of a metaphor?

The electronic tablets have for the purpose of presentations replaced the computer notebooks. And both of those electronic devices are replacements for the paper tablet and notebook.

A tablet pad is a natural thing to write and draw on, and to use to show people what you’ve drawn. But it’s static and not easily transferable except through a Fax or FedEx. Paper tablets are thin and light weight, so are electronic tablets. Paper tablets let you draw on them, and so do electronic tablets.

There has been an unusual amount of skepticism and denouncing of tablets by the analyst community, and logically the PC makers who don’t have one. They have sought to pigeon-hole the electronic tablet as a consumption (only) or “media” tablet. A lot of the press has echoed that canard hoping to look smart and offer critical assessment. Reminds me of when I was a kid and the smart people were saying, color TV will never catch on, too expensive, too unnatural looking.

The smart people today are trying to prove that one wouldn’t be able to, or want to do “real” work on a tablet. Well I wouldn’t want to work on the Market Watch spreadsheet on a tablet, but I could do it, I’d just have to scroll a lot. Kathleen Maher regularly writes essays and major portions of TechWatch on a tablet while in an airplane or airport; she seems to do just fine creating content on a tablet. She’s adapted.

It doesn’t have to be a computer

Probably the biggest problem people have with appreciating the tablet is they are trying to make it into a computer. Someone has said that if you want to make something new acceptable, you have to make it look like something old. The problem most critics of tablets have is they are trying to make the tablet be like a computer, whereas it’s really like a tablet—a paper tablet. It doesn’t have to be a “real computer,” it’s the next generation of things, a new thing.

So the CAD companies, and the PR people, and the designers, and the 20-somethings got it right away and accepted the new tablet as it is. Tablet users averaged 30 percent more viewing time per session compared with desktops, according to data released last week by Ooyala. So yes it is a consumption device, but users are consuming far more on it than they ever did on a PC. How many times have you heard someone say, I don’t want to watch a movie on my PC. Of course those people never rode on an airplane flight longer than two hours, or if they did they were asleep and failed to notice all the people watching movies on their PCs, and now tablets.

This however scares the pants off the PC suppliers. Apple was cute and expensive and not a threat. But now, this tablet thing, it’s upsetting everyone’s spreadsheet and really disturbing the supply chain and all those hedge fund managers who used it to pick stocks.

Embrace the new—exploit it

Kindle isn’t trying to make the Fire into a computer. It’s a vehicle for Amazon’s content. Google’s Chromebook has basically failed just as the Smartbook, and Netbook did. Why? No one wants half a computer no matter how cheap it is. HP missed that point with their Slate – we don’t want a computer with a touch screen, we want a real computer AND a tablet. Tablets are only cannibals of ill-conceived PCs, not real PCs. If the PC market’s growth was based on shoving low cost and low performance machines down the consumer’s throat the PC suppliers made a bad call—the consumers don’t want them.

If the PC suppliers try to make a tablet that is a low cost PC with a touch screen and an app store it won’t work. That’s missing the point. Tablets are good at being a tablet. And one day, not too far away, we’ll walk into a lobby, and on the wall in a frame will be THE IDEA that started the company, but it will be on a tablet not a cocktail napkin.

Sometimes a tablet is just a tablet – Sigmund Freud

Of forecasts and thinking about Steve

2011-11-04T01:19:08Z

We’ve just finished a round of reports, our semiconductor quarter shipments and forecast report Market Watch, our quarterly AIB shipments and forecast report, the mobile devices report, and the HPU/EPG report and forecast.

Forecasting is a tricky business and even though we’ve been at it longer than most, it never gets easy, and it’s always scary. We had some brilliant seminal moments where we called the future correctly and one or two where we missed it. Thinking about the future and what trend might happen next, or what technology will come next got me thinking about Steve Jobs.

The future is right out there…

Jobs has done something for the industry and maybe humanity that I think has gone un-praised and maybe recognized—he got us to look out, to dream, and to expect excellence, maybe demand it. So I’m looking into my crystal ball and trying to figure out how much of an impact tablets and ultrabooks will have on our industry, as well as what else might evolve or be inspired by them. Jobs of course is responsible for both, first with the ultra-thin, ultra-light Air and then with the iPad. But it wasn’t just a thin & light notebook, or just a tablet, the Air and iPad were (and are) devices with style, charm, and a new user paradigm—we think differently about those devices than we did about their predecessors, and, we think and react to whole world differently because of them. In the last year, post iPod/iPad, what screen in your life have you not tried to interact with by touching it—regardless if it is a touch-screen or not?

Prior to Apple’s renaissance Sony was the trend and style setter. When we wanted Avant-garde products we looked to, or waited for Sony. Sony had no peers or even imitators that came close. Apple took the crown from Sony but instead of being just an Avant-garde product supplier, it became the model, the company every other company wanted to be. And so as quickly as their designers, engineers, and budgets would allow them, other companies began copying Apple, as best as they could. And that is Job’s unwitting gift. By delighting and exciting the consumers, Apple has raised the bar for product innovation and consumer expectation. And that makes forecasting even harder.

Will tablets cannibalize PCs, or will they expand the market. Yes and yes. But more importantly how and why? What new uses and users will there be for tablets, and when? What new form factor device will spring out of the imagination of some designer or engineer because of their experience with a tablet, smartphone, or ultrabook? What will come out of it, “Gee, you know if I could only…” And bam—a new product idea, category and maybe an industry may pop up.

You know you can’t see the future in the rearview mirror, and even that cliché is a forecast of a kind—“rearview mirrors” are going to disappear from automobiles, trucks and buses in the next couple of years and be replaced by cameras and screens with better visibility and even the ability to see things in the dark. And GPUs will power them and their screens. And not only will they see, they will remember like a DVR, a kind of trip recorder, which of course will feed the car’s journey to the web and cloud for traffic control, accident prevention, and forensics.

And what if your smrtphone and/or tablet, or Ultrabooks did the same thing? What if the devices you carry which have cameras, and mass storage, and always on web connections, and GPS, and gyros, and long batter life, recorded your life, storing it in the cloud. Think how many arguments you might win when you say, “You did too say that—here, let me prove it…” Think of the effect of an alibi in a crime case. Imagine that law enforcement one day requires you to have a personal recorder. Imagine your great grandchildren looking at you when you were their age, and then one day it’s in stereovision too.

Seem like a big leap to go from lebity-leben discrete GPUs shipped in Q3 to a personal recorder in stereovision that the police require you to carry just like a driver’s license? Not when you’re trying to forecast the future it isn’t.

It’s the future, it’s right out there…

Batteries are my best friend

2011-10-27T17:10:51Z

I have referred to the smart phone as a PC—personal companion. But now have expand that title to include the tablet, it too is a PC. So, maybe a smartphone is a PPC—personal pocket companion. As a matter of fact, we have lots of personal companions, battery powered mobile devices.

The demand for these devices has exploded creating a market for over two billion processors.:

Over three quarters of a billion smartphones will ship in 2016
Feature and other phones will hit 869 million units in 2016
Almost 300 million tablets will ship in 2016
E-book readers shipments could reach 100 million a year by 2016
Handheld game consoles will hit 91 million by 2016

The processors powering these devices are truly amazing, consuming remarkably little power, built in the latest nanometer technology, and delivering unbelievable performance and functionality. And although all of the devices will share some functionality and capabilities, no single device will kill any of the others … at least not immediately. Each device will have a different form, primary function, and price. All will be connected all the time, and most of them will have 3D displays and cameras.

More than 16 processor companies and five suppliers of IP are chasing this market. Compared to the four or five processor companies chasing the PC market that makes the mobile processor market over populated by four-to-one— is a consolidation coming? Are there too many suppliers chasing the same customers?

The sharp growth the devices have enjoyed recently took a long time to get started. For example, the first standalone tablet was the GRiDPad in 1989 (which presumably gave Jeff Hawkins the founder of Palm, the idea for the Palm which was realized in 1992.)

In 2001 Microsoft reinvented the concept calling it a “Pen Computer”. And then in 2010 Apple brought the category to life with the iPad. The first smartphone was the IBM Simon in 1992, then Nokia entered the market 1996 and since then, the segment has taken off like a rocket.

The concept for the e-book came from Michael Hart in 1971, and the first battery powered standalone unit was the Rocket eBook in 1998, but it was the Kindle that lit up the market in 2007.

Other popular mobile devices like game consoles, navigation units, portable DVD players, and digital picture frames all use high resolution screens and sophisticated SoCs.

All the pieces needed to make powerful, small devices with low power consumption for longer battery operation have come together and conveniently at the same time as demand for such devices is ready for take-off.

And since there’s no Moore’s law for batteries, the gain in battery life has come from the clever SoC designs and the shrinking of the size of the transistors thanks to Moore's Law. All of these devices touch our lives in some important way or another—they’re all personal devices and just as a motorcycle shares some of the features of a car and truck, we’re not going to replace one with the other. So, we won’t replace any of these personal devices with just one thing. We want all our toys. And lots of batteries.

Of hammers, horseshoes and tablets

2011-10-10T15:32:37Z

Do you have a hammer at home? Of course you do, everyone does. You might even have two, maybe three (I have four). When was the last time you bought a hammer? If you’re 40 years old, and you have four hammers, then your average buy-cycle is one hammer every ten years. Doesn’t sound like a growth market, and yet you find a hammer in every hardware store and most general purpose stores, even Walgreens sells hammers. There are websites dedicated to hammers—just hammers.

So if hammers are such low volume almost zero CAGR products, why are there dozens of hammer makers? Where’s the industry consolidation that we smart analysts predict when market growth slows down and there are too many suppliers?

Everybody has a hammer. Not everybody has a tablet. Not everybody has a PC or a mobile phone. Tablets, PCs, and mobile phones are growth markets; hammers aren’t.

There are different sized hammers, for different jobs. A tack hammer for, well, tacks, ball peen for putting dents in your neighbor's car door to teach him a lesson about blocking your driveway, claw hammers for removing nails and driving in wood screws, and sledge hammers for fixing door hinges and holding down things while the glue dries

There are different sized PCs and tablets too. Samsung, which just announced its Galaxy Tab 7.0, has a 7-inch, 7.7-inch, 8.9-inch, and a10.1-inch tablet for sale—a size for every man women, and child. RIM has a 7-inch tablet and so does Amazon, you may have heard about them if you weren’t busy in the garage pounding nails into the dog house you built.

A proper sized tablet

But Steve Jobs told us 7-inch tablets are DOA, and in HP and RIM’s case he may have been right (he was not often wrong). HP had to build a few hundred thousand of them to figure out they were wrong. And seeing how well they sold should have proved the point. Huh? Now RIM is trying to prove to themselves a 7-inch tablet is something someone wants, but they don’t know for whom: is it a business machine and entertainment machine, or a candy mint—you’re both right. You get those duality kind of problems when you have dual CEOs.

Amazon like Apple only different, doesn’t much pay attention to what anyone says and just goes ahead and does the right thing. Bezos has been doing that since he opened the store, and like Jobs he’s seldom (if ever) been wrong. And then there’s Sony. Sony makes a 7-inch tablet, and some of the folks at Sony even know about it, no one else it seems does either. At MAX, Sony was showing off a clever two-screen folding tablet. Sony used to be the style setter, and they still make beautiful looking stuff (I just bought a 13-in 2.5 pound Vaio). But Sony isn’t Apple or Amazon, not any more.

While everyone is busy predicting how many tablets will sell this and next year, and getting giddy about how Android is out-pacing iOS in shipments, Apple is running 25/8 to keep up with demand. Where are all those Android tablets going, the hinter lands of China?

And how many customers do you think HP’s fire sale siphoned off from the big tablet boom, in a worldwide economic slump? Well we know exactly how many don’t we? 300,000. Now if you count them and the 100,000 or so RIM is going to dump, and Acer’s, Amazon’s, Samsung’s, and Billybob Joe’s tablets you might get to half as many as Apple sells.

Why, they’re selling like, hammers. Everybody wants and needs one or two. In our about to be released new report on Mobile Devices and the Semiconductors in Them, we found no less than 464 suppliers of tablets, and 21 suppliers of semiconductors—21! That’s about the same number of suppliers of hammers, maybe a little less. But the big difference between tablet and semiconductor suppliers and hammer suppliers is stay-ability. Three years from now there won’t be 21 semiconductor and 464 tablet suppliers, there will be maybe a dozen of each or less. The hammer suppliers with their zero CAGR market will still be here.