Intel Corp (INTC)

[Tenchu]

Muzosi,

of course for you buying a completely undifferentiated piece of silicon from intel and slapping it on a board designed by intel is all you can do

And all you can do is make unsubstantiated claims based on completely false assumptions like the one you just made here.

There are lots of IP vendors out there mainly because writing IP blocks is as easy as writing smartphone apps. Even hard IP blocks with the layout and synthesis already done for you isn't that hard to do.

The value they add is the ability for their customers to not have to reinvent the wheel. But if reinventing the wheel were the only barrier to making a car, everyone would be doing it.

Putting all of these proprietary IP blocks together in "new and interesting ways" will among other things create "new and interesting" bugs that will take a lot of time and effort to flush out. Then there is that oh-so-trivial effort of trying to make these blocks talk to each other nicely. Often their interfaces to the core logic will be vastly different, and developers will spend a huge amount of time having to deal with them.

They will also wrestle with the IP vendors for documentation, bug fixes, and new features that the vendors may or may not agree to implement. After all, if the vendors decide to implement every new feature that a customer demands, they might as well be working directly for that customer.

Believe me, it's hard for everyone, not just me. That's why a lot of the big players choose just to develop their own IP blocks rather than buy them from IP vendors. If it were so easy for them, they would do it and master that art way before the average SV startup could.

Tenchu