Intel's 120mm2 Core chip is built on a smaller process than the ARM based competition meaning there are far more transistors on that $200 chip than the one you are comparing it to. Also keep in mind that Intel doesn't need to charge $200 to make a profit. The current Atom chips are price competitive with ARM based alternatives. The Atom parts aren't quite up to par with an A15 based part yet but I think it'd be foolish to count Intel out.
The primary cost of a SoC is manufacturing. Process advantages mean that you have access to cheaper transistors that have better performance and power characteristics. The easiest way to improve the ratio of performance to anything in microprocessors has always been to make it smaller. There have been far too many words wasted on the role of instruction sets and architectures. Those things matter but that's the easy part. The hard part is getting a meaningful advantage in the manufacturing side, which is what Intel has. This is precisely why AMD is dying. They can't even undercut Intel because Global Foundries is so far behind Intel that they physically can't produce an equivalent product for less despite Intel's ~60% margins.
I think what you will see is Intel getting more aggressive in the mobile space in the next couple years because they are going to want to ensure that TSMC doesn't get a chance to catchup. TSMC is the real key to anyone threatening Intel not ARM.
Personally, I like to write ideas down as they come but prefer to let them stew there for a while. My problem is that I get excited about something initially but that excitement fades over time especially when I get to the point where I have to do something hard and/or not fun.
So generally I'll try to do one of two things:
1) Find a partner. I find it a lot easier to get going and a lot harder to quit when there's someone else going through it with you; sort of like going to the gym...
2) Pick an idea that still excites me even after sitting in my list for a while. If I'm going to go it alone, whatever it is has to be important enough to me that I still care after that initial honeymoon. This time is really valuable to me personally. I find that in the beginning I focus on potential but given some time I'll eventually come back to earth and think more about what needs to be done, all the steps, and potential roadblocks. After all that, if I'm still excited to tackle the problem, I have at least some confidence that I'll have the conviction to push through the hard times.
Fair warning, my current list is long and the number completed is still zero (abandoned projects is also zero). I have just started working on something recently though, so there is some hope. I guess this is really a long winded way of saying try to find something that you're really passionate about, don't waste time on things you aren't, and don't get discouraged if you haven't found it yet.
Right or wrong, your argument is exactly why Ballmer is still in charge and at the same time the reason many think Microsoft's future is bleak until he's not.
I don't really think you can evaluate government loans the same way you would as a private investor. The federal government has defacto senior equity in every company that is incorporated and/or operates in the US. As a private investor the only upside you get from a loan is the interest. It's not even entirely fair to use a VC type model here as the government will also reap rewards from companies that indirectly benefit from these investments.
Your points regarding state-owned companies is more a case against equity investment and a defense of the loan model. The US government isn't going to go to extreme measures to recoup a billion dollars and because it doesn't have any additional equity there's no other real incentive to prop up the companies that it has loaned money to. The free market is an extremely powerful system that is capable of remarkable things but it's not perfect and there are problems that the free market won't address on it's own (climate change being a poster boy example).
I don't really think you can evaluate government loans the
same way you would as a private investor.
So, there are different ways to isolate a core philosophical disagreement but I think this may be one of them. In a different context you will hear people say that "the government is not a household" because the USG can print money. OK, so call that one point of view.
Another point of view looks at the largest and most successful companies (like Apple, Google, et alia) and compares them to the smallest countries (like Iceland). Interestingly, you can do the math to see that Iceland gets about $5.6B of tax revenue with a population of 320,000, while Apple makes $156B with an employee base of about 73,000. This indicates that Apple is about 120X more efficient in terms of dollars generated per person; indeed, significantly more so in that tax payments are more on the involuntary side while Apple purchases are more on the voluntary side.
You can extend the same kind of analysis to Fortune 500 companies and many small countries. This is a very interesting exercise because no one disputes that the Fortune 500 companies can be evaluated by private investors, or that the countries have flags, fiscal policies, and the like. And yet the former outperform the latter by a lot on metrics like this.
So, that's the point of view that says that governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies. One not-so-bad way to think of it is that a citizen is buying a huge package of goods from the government, like cable bundling on steroids, and can only switch service providers by moving.
But, in any case, because we disagree on that point we'll probably also disagree on others. For example, the senior equity thing...are you stating the USG can exercise eminent domain and/or nationalize a company at will? I agree that in practice they have done this, but I at least don't believe this is a good thing.
Anyway, yeah, that's the crux of it: one group does not believe governments should be judged like companies, another group believes they should. Hopefully you can at least see our point of view even if you don't decide to convert :)
I'm almost certain you're not arguing that "dollars generated per person" is the only valid measure of the success of a government as compared to the success of a large corporation. So how do you factor in all the other measures of success in such an evaluation?
Trivially, corporations are amoral entities that have the ability, and sometimes the obligation, to jettison lines of business that lose money or simply don't contribute enough profit, whereas governments often have the legal or moral obligation to maintain or expand "lines of business" whose purpose does not coincide with the generation of cash. Civilization necessitates at least some pursuits that will never make a profit, and governments are the major organizational entities (yes, there are some others) that are often left to such pursuits.
It continues to shock me how many people believe that profit-seeking or optimizing production is "immoral". I have nothing much to say about it, since this position is fundamentally irreconcilable with the core ideas of capitalism, which I use as a framework to view all sorts of different aspects of life that become problematic if we believe that people are somehow duped into spending their money or time at a utility loss to themselves.
I'm almost certain you're not arguing that "dollars
generated per person" is the only valid measure of the
success of a government
Sure, it isn't the only measure of success, but if this number is very low then that is (I would argue) a measure of failure. "Dollars generated per person" = tax-revenues per person is very similar to GDP-per-capita. And a high GDP-per-capita means you can spend on healthcare, earthquake proof buildings, and all kinds of standard-of-living improving stuff.
So how do you factor in all the other measures of success
in such an evaluation?
I think that many -- not all -- are downstream of dollars generated per person. The more dollars per person, the more money for science, for public works, for roads and bridges, for charity, for whatever you want. You can't buy love, but you can buy most of the lower level items in Maslow's hierarchy, no?
Trivially, corporations are amoral entities that have the
ability, and sometimes the obligation, to jettison lines of
business that lose money or simply don't contribute enough
profit, whereas governments often have the legal or moral
obligation to maintain or expand "lines of business" whose
purpose does not coincide with the generation of cash.
Civilization necessitates at least some pursuits that will
never make a profit, and governments are the major
organizational entities (yes, there are some others) that
are often left to such pursuits.
Sure. But I guess my claim is that in order to pursue those other "lines of business", governments must still post a profit (more tax/fees than expenditures). The alternate school of thought (promoted by Cheney and Krugman alike) says that deficits don't matter and that governments cannot go bankrupt.
[I might also quibble with your use of the term "amoral" to describe businesses and "moral" to describe governments, as most of the millions of people dead in the 20th century were killed by governments. You have to kind of go back to the East India Company to find something comparable for businesses (and even that was a public/private hybrid). Anyway, digression, my apologies.]
I'm trying to be very careful to avoid responding to things you're not actually saying. This would be more fun to discuss over some beers.
Trying to tiptoe away from Godwin, I'll agree the use of moral/amoral is worth the quibble. Certainly it's people who have morals, and institutions that have, at best, ethics or principles. I'm not trying to argue that governments are moral, although they do take on responsibilities that corporations cannot or would not, and that such responsibilities can create something like a moral obligation -- operating on an axis that does not include a profit factor -- without imbuing the institution with "morals" per se.
Cool, yeah, beer is awesome. Appreciate the discussion.
Another way to express what I'm saying is this:
Individuals do lots of things that aren't directly for profit, like open source or art or helping out a friend. But over the long term they need to create more wealth (apples, chairs, computers, etc.) than they consume.
Groups of various kinds (companies, etc.) do lots of things that aren't for profit, like throwing birthday parties for their members or having their people sponsor charity runs for research. Yet they too need to have wealth creation exceed wealth consumption to survive in the long run.
Municipalities and local governments -- ditto. Municipalities provide services in exchange for property taxes, and they can/do go bankrupt. We're seeing that happen to CA cities now.
Now, a federal government is definitely special in some key ways: it can order guys with guns to your house and coordinates national defense. But you can still model this as a municipality that is competing with other national governments for your tax dollars. Immigration is in part about getting a better deal from country A and moving from country B.
This is not how we've been raised to think about government. Many on the broad political right are sort of emotional about the federal government's defense efforts; many on the broad political left are sort of emotional about the federal government's non-defense efforts. And in our current world it is kind of unpatriotic to just think of them as a service provider: "are they keeping the peace at low cost? are they pursuing the right strategy for long term health?".
There are macroeconomic arguments as well about whether the "government is or should be modeled as a company", but really you do get at a good point in that the idea that government is just a service provider cuts against the grain of American thought, both left and right.
However, it is an interesting line of analysis that is gaining in currency. See for example KP's "USA Inc.", which looks at the USA as if it was a company:
While physical proximity will always mean banding together for common defense (so long as we are corporeal beings!), I'd argue that the internet makes migration-to-a-better-service-provider a much more feasible option. Facebook facilitates transnationalism: your friends are sometimes nearby, sometimes on other continents, but they often aren't your neighbors. Skype and all these telecommuting tools allow you to work remotely as well.
Moving doesn't have the same cost that it used to. Making the cost of migration plummet could be very important.
I certainly understand where you're coming from but obviously disagree at least partially.
There is a difference between saying that the government should invest in and fund all companies and saying that there are cases where the free market will not act in the national best interest on it's own and the government can. The underlying issue here is that oil is subsidized in the US. It's not just the tax benefits to oil companies, it's all the military spending required to maintain undisrupted oil flow from the most unstable regions in the world. We've gotten to the point where we can't just stop cold turkey; so you've got to invest some money to clean up a mess made in the past. I'd love to get to the point where all our energy choices were on a level playing field so the free market could do the work but that just doesn't seem plausible today.
It's cliche at this point, but the space program and DARPA/ARPA investments led to a lot of the technology that enabled the formation and/or success of companies like Apple and Google.
This is off topic but with regard to your some of your other points, it's completely true that the federal government doesn't have to treat it's debt the same way a household does. That doesn't mean it should spend as much as it wants, but it does mean that it can spend a little more than it brings in forever. By senior equity I meant that the government's claims to profits(taxes) are senior to other equity holders.
> So, that's the point of view that says that governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies.
If governments should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate companies, then companies should be evaluated in the same way you'd evaluate governments. Otherwise you're putting down a double standard.
I agree. The way the laws have been interpreted are incredibly arbitrary and create way to much uncertainty. Horse racing and fantasy sports are legal because they have friends in high places. Theoretically games of skill are legal but skill seems to be a word with a vague legal definition.
I'd extend that thought and say the problem with American secondary education is American primary education; and the problem with American primary education is American pre-school education or lack there of; and the problem with American pre-school education or the lack there of is that investing in 3 year olds requires a long term outlook and patience; two things politicians and decision makers are incentivized to be deficient in.
Um, investing in 3 year olds is done (assuming raising children is not the states responsibility) by parents, not politicians... not sure what your point is here.
I'd don't have any particular love for public schools but k-12 is covered by government in the US. There's no reason that it couldn't or shouldn't extend down. In my view, education gets harder the older the students are. Regardless of how many years of school the public decides to fund, I think we should start as early as possible. There's a compounding effect to education; put in the time, effort, and money early and you make the future a lot easier.
Nothing can replace good parents but there's only so much that can be done to improve the general quality of parents. Given that society has a vested interest in the future of every child, I don't think it's unreasonable for government to try to do better. That doesn't necessarily mean the public school system; it could be vouchers, various incentives, etc. But just saying parents need to do it is a cop out, shortsighted, and unrealistic.
There's no doubt that there is a lot wrong with education in general but there's also a lot of great things about it too. The value of bringing together a large number of young, intelligent people with all kinds of interests is incredible.
In terms of what's wrong and suggestions for improvement, it's hard to know where to start. One big, doable change may just be more standardized testing. The price of education is simply a reflection of the fact that employers and students overvalue degrees. This leads to this perverse effect that causes people to enroll because they feel like they have to, not because they want to. The whole dynamic just seems to create an enormous amount of problems. Tying so much economic value to a college degree drives prices and attendance up and the effectiveness and true value of education down.
What do you mean by Intel is making the wrong bet by going all-in on mobile? By mobile are you talking about smartphone/tablet or laptop? What would you do instead?
I feel Intel is going to make the mistake of taking their datacenter advantage for granted. They should be doing everything to cement that advantage instead of an unnecessary focus on mobile, by which I mean the present ARM space of smartphone/tablet.
This goes with any business, but Intel should figure out what its "plus" is. They own perf/watt and perf/thread, and their uarch, x86, is the standard for cloud loads. As the cloud matures and becomes more uarch agnostic, everything being open source, they still have to find a way of differentiating themselves.
The point is 20 years ago the majority of coders were coding x86, directly, then 10 years ago say WinIntel, and now our apis are REST calls. That is to say, the majority of programming has been getting increasingly removed from the underlying hardware. Intel it seems finally clued in to this with MS announcing WinRT.
So in short, Intel should start innovating at the platform level. And hey, the platform isn't just a microprocessor anymore.
I can see what you mean to some extent. The top of the line server parts are still Sandy Bridge-E. By the time Ivy-Bridge-E is out Haswell will be available on the traditional PC side.
I would actually make a different argument though. As time goes on the absolute cost of the CPU is not that important. For big data centers lowering costs is about efficiency more than cheaper hardware. So in my mind a lot of what Intel is trying to do on the Mobile side, both laptop and smartphone/tablet, will help them in the data center. If Intel can drive down both peak and idle power consumption while maintaining or even improving both single threaded and multi threaded performance, there's potential to really lower the power needed to run a data center and in turn create a lot of value.
The real question is what's the next big thing going to be? Eventually the current CPU model will give out to something else. Maybe that's something like Psi or Tesla or maybe something completely different.
The primary cost of a SoC is manufacturing. Process advantages mean that you have access to cheaper transistors that have better performance and power characteristics. The easiest way to improve the ratio of performance to anything in microprocessors has always been to make it smaller. There have been far too many words wasted on the role of instruction sets and architectures. Those things matter but that's the easy part. The hard part is getting a meaningful advantage in the manufacturing side, which is what Intel has. This is precisely why AMD is dying. They can't even undercut Intel because Global Foundries is so far behind Intel that they physically can't produce an equivalent product for less despite Intel's ~60% margins.
I think what you will see is Intel getting more aggressive in the mobile space in the next couple years because they are going to want to ensure that TSMC doesn't get a chance to catchup. TSMC is the real key to anyone threatening Intel not ARM.