Do you ever wonder how companies become dominant in a
certain market in the first place? While it is true that
maintaining dominance is a lot easier than acquiring it, one
can observe new market leaders emerging on a regular basis.
There is always a chance that a radical change will come
along and upset the apple cart, biological based computing
for example, and Intel's huge investment in fabs and MOS
design know how will be negated. But that isn't likely
within the decade and it does nothing for AMD or AMD64.
In the reality of the here and now immutable technical and
economic trends in semiconductor manufacturing strongly
favor the big guys. Small guys can survive with a fabless
business if they concentrate on niche markets and gather
unique and valuable IP. But the merchant uP business is
ruthless in its combined requirments of extreme performance
and low costs/economies of scale for success.
AMD has stuck around competing against Intel even while
bigger and richer players whithered away under Intel's
intense competitive pressure and it should be admired for
that. But the long term trends in the semi industry work
against it and it's hard to see how AMD will survive much
longer as an independent public semico with competitive
internal fab capacity. And historically speaking, going
fabless has fatally wounded the competitiveness of high
performance uPs vendors that have tried it. AMD might find
a way to make it work with IBM for example. But until it
demonstrates that it's succeeded where others have failed
computer OEMs will be very wary of making a large, long
term committment to AMD64.
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