Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ficc!karl From: karl@ficc.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.intel Subject: Re: Intel (no)286, 386SX billboards Keywords: 386SX Message-ID: <7101@ficc.uu.net> Date: 25 Nov 89 16:05:14 GMT References: <6475@lynx.UUCP> <6964@ficc.uu.net> <17@caslon.cs.arizona.edu> <43@braaten.UUCP> Reply-To: karl@ficc.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) Distribution: comp Organization: Ferranti International Controls Lines: 32 As an Intel shareholder, I find the billboards to be a transparently offensive attempt to keep users locked into a proprietary, single-source architecture. Microsoft, Intel and IBM are working it from the software side, too, via a thing called OS/2. The 386SX chip may not cost much more than the 286, but the final price of 386SX systems are substantially higher. I think the 386SX exists in order to keep the price unreasonably high for the 386. Anyone see that article in Business Week where an Intel VP (David House?) said that the American RISC chip designer/manafacturers licensing those designs to the Japanese was criminal? While he may have a point in that the agreements do give the Japanese more capability to compete in the high-performance microprocessor market, it is fairly obvious that the extra clout it puts behind the various non-Intel RISC chips may give one of them enough strength to supercede the currently dominant proprietary Intel CISC architecture -- and Intel would clearly view that more directly as a threat to Intel itself, despite that VP's trying to present it as an America vs. Japan issue. As long as I'm rambling, here's something that I find really amazing: Apple is a four billion dollar a year company, while Intel does only three billion a year. How may products does Apple have total? One, in a way... the Mac and its derivitaves. How many does Intel have? Thousands, probably. It's little wonder Apple is trying to use the legal system to stake out substantial protection for concepts and ideas they more or less got from Xerox, since that's about the only thing they have to differentiate themselves from everybody else. -- -- uunet!ficc!karl "The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first." -- Pascal