Re: Advice on system purchase
On 10/30/2012 12:02 PM, Celejar wrote:
> As I have said, I don't have a deep understanding of these issues, but
> one apparent flaw in your argument is that IBM, Motorola and DEC
> weren't moving billions of their chips independently of their push into
> the desktop market, as ARM is.
What's fundamentally flawed is your (lack of) analysis and your
conclusion. You're looking at absolute numbers and you can't do that.
You must look at market share percentage. ARM based chips may ship in
2B/year quantity today but the overall market is dozens of billions. In
the mid 1990s, the period regarded, IBM and Motorola chips each had a
market share equal to or greater than ARM chips today.
More importantly, both were already shipping chips into desktops at that
time in decent numbers, into Macs and a half dozen brands of PREP/CHIRP
platforms running Windows NT. There are zero ARM chips in desktops
today. Ergo, they were in a good position to succeed on the desktop.
Yet they both failed, PREP/CHIRP much sooner than Mac, which only
recently switched to Intel.
In the case of PREP/CHIRP PowerPC desktops, they failed in the
marketplace because ISVs didn't come on board and ship binaries for PPC
as they did for x86.
So again, ARM will never reach the desktop, nor succeed, without full
ISV support. Which, as I stated previously, is why ARM will only have a
chance on the desktop if the consumer conditions are right to launch an
Android based "PC appliance". This will provide the same interface from
smartphone to tablet to living room PC. Success will have nothing to do
with numbers of chips shipped, but with consumer acceptance, which is
the case with any product.
--
Stan
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