Weekly News—October 16, 2015

Largest Tech Merger Ever

Earlier in the year Avago announced that it was acquiring Broadcom for $37B (the merged company will lose the Avago name and the whole company will be Broadcom). This week an even bigger tech merger was announced: Dell announced that it was acquiring EMC for $67B. This deal effectively completes a transition from Dell's early days as mostly a direct-to-consumer supplier of PCs to an enterprise IT solution supplier. Among the names also hidden under the EMC umbrella are RSA (secureID) and 80% of VMware. However, some voices argue that this is a merger of weakness. Dell was a powerhouse in the consumer marketplace but that has gradually been cannibalized by smartphones; EMC was a powerhouse in enterprise server infrastrucutre, but that has been cannibalized by the cloud. You don't need a lot of vision to see that the future belongs to smartphones and IoT devices, with cloud-based big-data back ends.

Intel Results, Qualcomm Tries to Muscle In

Intel announced its quarterly results. The headline numbers were revenue of $14.5B, down slightly from $14.6B last year but above analysts projections of $14.2B. Net income was also above projections at 64 cents/share.

As always with Intel, it is interesting to look another layer down. They are also seeing the move to cloud computing and away from the PC itself. The quarter just ending had PC chips at $8.5B and data center server chips at $4.1B. This compares to a year ago when PC chips brought in $9.2B and data center $3.7B. But the profits in both divisions were $2.1B despite the over 2X difference in revenues. As everyone knows, Intel missed the mobile and smartphone transition. They have been trying to build a position in tablet computers by shipping their chips with "contra revenue" which is a nice way to say they are shipping them for less than they cost to build. It seems they have cut back on contra revenue but as a result tablet chip sales fell 40% year on year. Intel just doesn't have the same momentum in markets outside the PC/server where software compatibility with the x86 architecture is king.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm (and ARM) have this problem the other way around: no x86 software compatibility. Qualcomm has previously announced its intention to enter the server market but at the end of last week it had a live demonstration of its Server Development Platform (SDP), which it said is now sampling to tier-one data centers (I presume this means Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc). The system includes a pre-production version of 24-core SoC based on the ARMv8-A instruction set.

5nm at imec

Silicon of the 5nm tapeout is starting to come back, so far just from the SAQP-1993i version. There are lines, and lines after the cut mask.

    My original blog about the 5nm tapeout is here.