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> AMD lived for years in Intel's shadow and barely scraped by, surviving only because they were willing to price their chips lower than Intel wanted to. You me
by mbell 14y ago
> AMD lived for years in Intel's shadow and barely scraped by, surviving only because they were willing to price their chips lower than Intel wanted to.
You mean cutting margins to survive while they didn't have the luxury of massive volume pricing? Isn't this exactly what you were arguing can not possibly happen?
> ARM is something of an anomaly. They were as much as left for dead, with conventional wisdom thinking one of Motorola, IBM or even Intel would run them over like a bug on the road.
Which architectures from each of those companies was in competition with ARM in its early days? I don't think that competition came till much later when ARM had already proven itself in the micro-controller market.
> To credit NVidia with the success of 3Dfx is misleading. It was the Voodoo card that was marketed aggressively to consumers which
Nvidia bought them because Nvidia created a part that performed on par or better than the 3Dfx part but also did 2D, which was a flat out revolution in the graphics card market.
> All three of these companies got lucky.
Sorry, that is just an incredibly egotistical comment to make.
- astrodust 14y agoI mean AMD was shipping enormous quantities of low-margin parts. They didn't have the market share of Intel, but the chips they did make sold fairly well, enough to keep in the game. They also had the advantage of not betting the house on Itanium or losing their shirt on the doomed Pentium 4 architecture. In the early days, where ARM was used in the Newton and very little else. Motorola absolutely owned the market. If I was to bet on someone to unseat them I'd have gone with Hitachi and their SH series as used in the Dreamcast. Like I said, they got lucky, but they also played smart when they did get lucky. Too many companies have been handed the opportunity of the century only to fumble it. It's a credit to each of them they went from underdog to player. I still don't think this discounts how much money it takes to succeed. It takes a great company with a product that is at least good enough, not necessarily better.