Options: Dispersions and Volatility Spreads

[Chris McConnel]

VAX and the economics of microprocessors

John Mashey is known in computing circles for a whole raft of things, among them are his work on the design of the original MIPS architecture, his work at SGI, and a long history of in-depth posts in the newsgroup comp.arch. (Some Googling will net you this "greatest hits" list, for instance.) David Kanter of Realworldtech has taken one of Mashey's posts and, with the author's permission, fleshed it out with more data and graphs for posting as a multipart series. Part I of the series is now available, with Part II on the way.

One of the things that really struck me in reading the retrospective was just how prominent a role completely non-architectural factors play in the stories of the successes and failures of various processors. It's not that I wasn't aware of the impact of these factors, but the article really brings them out in a way that's extremely useful for those of us outside the industry itself who live in a world of stats, benchmark numbers, and the kinds of architectural comparisons that Ars and other sites periodically produce.

Not to disinter a dead horse and beat it a bit more, but one of my goals in covering the Apple Switch was to bring out how these kinds of economic and political considerations can and usually do trump purely technological ones. I'm willing to concede that I may have tried to swing the pendulum a bit too forcefully back in the "it's the economies of scale, stupid, and not performance/watt" direction, but it's certainly the case that these things can and often do turn out to be the main factors in major decisions about technology—especially when they're combined with inter-company conflicts that are tied to specific personalities and management styles.

Moving on, the other striking feature of Mashey's history was the absence of a non-technological factor that, as of the past decade, is now playing an ever larger role in determining the fate of all types of technologies: the law. Specifically, intellectual property law and anti-trust law are two looming mountains on the current technological landscape, whereas in the period that Mashey covers they're more like hills. If, at some far distant point in my life, I sit down to write some kind of historical look at the computing industry in the 90's and the early decades of the 21st century, an enormous part of that story will be taken up with lawsuits and legislation. No doubt this is one reason why it will be the story of the permanent loss of American leadership in high technology. Know this fact, and get used to it: the world is now chock full of people who are the next John Mashey, and 90 percent of them are Asian.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060218-6215.htm