Historically, semiconductor manufacturing has been a brutal industry yet Intel has outperformed its peers by a wide margin. Here’s what I think is going on…
Advertisements
tech
Heterogeneous computing / GPGPU (INTC, AMD, NVDA)
Heterogeneous computing refers to computing systems that use a mix of different types of computational units. The type of heterogeneous computing that I am most interested in is rise of the general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU). The industry trend has been to use the GPU graphics chip for purposes other than graphics. Innovations in the GPGPU could cause some changes to the landscape between Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. I believe that heterogenous computing will grow from a small niche into a larger one. Continue reading
Digital River (DRIV) and payment processing (V, MA, GOOG, EBAY)
Digital River is a company that offers:
- Payment processing. For (very) small software vendors such as myself, Digital River competes with Paypal (owned by Ebay), Google Checkout (now Google Commerce), and others.
- E-commerce / online store. This relates to automatically letting the user download the product once payment is received, product updates, etc. etc. I use E-Junkie for this service.
Digital River has a lot of unhappy customers because it was upselling its customers’ customers. The software vendors are unhappy since they can’t opt out of the upselling (nor do they profit from it) and some of their customers are turned off by the upselling practices. Digital River doesn’t seem to understand its software vendors and has a terrible reputation among them (Google around… here is one example). I will never do business with Digital River as a software vendor. And I wouldn’t go long the stock.
Technology trends (many of which are overrated)
Many media articles constantly talk about how smartphones and tablets will eclipse the desktop PC and that everything will move to the cloud. I believe that these beliefs are erroneous.
ARM, Intel, and AMD in the (micro)server space
There is talk about ARM making inroads into the server market. I don’t believe that this will be a huge threat to Intel.
