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- THE FRIDAY LETTER -
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for friends and subscribers)
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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 341.0/May 16,
2008
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / Gilder: Achronix’s
Asynchronous Gains
- Friday Feature / Does Sigma Still Have 10X Potential?
- Friday
Blogger Bonus / Can mere mortals achieve these returns?
- Readings /
|
GILDER/FORBES
TELECOSM 2008: The exaflood |
The Week / Achronix’s Asynchronous
Gains
Gilder Telecosm Forum
Member (5/10/08): Chuck Moore has,
as far as I am able to discern, created such a radically faster and lower power
chip that is without peer or competition.
George Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (5/10/08): Why without peer or competition? As far as I can tell, the source of
the gains is asynchronous and parallel operation together with clever sleep-mode
and turnoff functions. Caltech computer science has been pursuing these
techniques for decades. As I have written for some time, asynch and parallelism
are becoming mandatory simply because a single clock pulse can no longer
propagate across an entire chip within the switching delay of transistor
circuitry.
So I am all for asynch--throw away the clock like Easy Rider--but every attempt
so far to achieve fully asynchronous computing devices, optimized for speed and
low power, suffers rigidities and programming idiosyncrasies that thwart its
adoption. Andrew Lines of Fulcrum
Microsystems made a heroic attempt, but Fulcrum is now focusing on
networking PHYs, I believe.
Moore's SEAForth system seems to entail adopting new architectures, a new
language, new testing and debugging methods, and new modes of parallelism. You
can always make large gains by starting from scratch with a new 7 layer
language and requiring the world to adapt to you rather than you adapting to
the world. At the end of the day, the advantages (20 GigaOps with a focus on
Fourier transforms that can be performed by other special purpose devices) are
not sufficiently overwhelming to enforce acceptance.
A better approach comes from Rajit Manohar of Achronix, a Carver Mead protégé who built the first asynchronous
microprocessor based on the MIPS instruction set and has focused on creating
compilers that allow the translation of ordinary ASICs to his asychronous field
programmable gate arrays.
Rajit and Carver will both be at Telecosm 2008 (http://www.telecosmconference.com/) if you are intrigued.
|
FRIDAY LETTER BOOK OF THE MONTH Covering the range of global warming
claims, from the famed "hockey stick graph" to a predicted rise of
mosquito borne diseases, the book is fascinating and even profound on the
flaws of computer modeling, the irrelevance of consensus to science, the
crippling effects of excessive specialization, and the mounting evidence of a
coming cooling trend. It ends with a cogent explanation of how carbon taxes
and offsets devastate the environment. --
George
Gilder |
Friday Feature /
Gilder Telecosm Forum
Member (5/11/08): Broadcom’s strength is in satellite and
cable TV boxes. IPTV is a totally different animal.
George Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (5/11/08): Well, not a totally different animal. It's closer to
cable and satellite than we are to chimps. It entails the same essential set of
functions, and a similar set of standards, which converge increasingly every
year.
My first real qualm about Sigma Designs
(SIGM) came at the Needham Conference in January, when Zoran (ZRAN) presented its agenda for Blu-ray, HDTV, IPTV and
related devices. Zoran may eke out its margins, but it executes. It entered the
imager controller market for digital cameras with its COACH chip against STMicro (STM), Texas Instruments (TXN) and
a number of others, and within the next two years it was dominant. Now it is
targeting Sigma.
But, Sigma can handle some erosion of share of an explosively growing market
from this disruptive threat from the bottom. Zoran's initial markets are mostly
in China.
Zoran has produced a Blu-ray
chip, with an integrated analog front end, that does the job for $15, enables a
more compact machine, and is more integrated. And its success prompts me to
believe that other companies may succeed as well in IPTV, which is a similar
though admittedly more exacting challenge. Broadcom
(BRCM) is a specialist in all these fields. Its failure to date is an amazing
upset by Sigma.
I still hold Sigma because of its first mover advantage and large current lead.
But I suspect its position will dwindle in time. If IPTV usurps various web-based
video technologies, the market may support two or more chip suppliers. But my Life After Television paradigm leads me
to believe that IPTV will give way to more computer oriented video systems, 3D
worlds and video teleconferencing technologies.
Broadcom conceives its strategy as focused on home area networks. Today this
realm is dominated by cable and satellite, but the technologies for IPTV with
its DVR and Internet capabilities will soon be needed for these converging
delivery systems as well. Broadcom has to master these codecs, tuners,
controllers, and interrupt mechanisms, and integrate them successfully in order
to continue their growth. They will have to be a player in IPTV. Broadcom also
has always believed that home wireless systems would obviate all the snarl of
cables and wires in the entertainment center and through the home. They will be
a large factor here also and could block Sigma's UWB plans entirely.
The real issue is how fast these codec markets will grow and how effective
Sigma will be in innovating in this space. Will
the markets grow fast enough to provide Sigma with a 10X potential?
Find out by visiting http://www.gildertech.com/ and becoming a Gilder Telecosm Forum
member today.
|
The Gilder Telecosm Forum To
learn how to join this powerful network of talented, tech-savvy investors and
thinkers online daily to debate, discuss, and decode new and emerging
technologies and share valuable and actionable investment advice, visit www.Gildertech.com today. |
Friday Blogger Bonus / Can mere mortals achieve these returns?
Rich Karlgaard,
Forbes.com, Digital Rules blog (5/13/08):
I spent a fascinating hour yesterday with Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and
now president of a $3 billion hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management.
According to the latest
Barron’s survey of top 75 hedge funds, Clarium has knocked out a 40.8%
three-year annualized return.
Disclosure about Thiel: He
was briefly, in 1989, an intern at Upside magazine, which I had
co-founded with a friend the year before. Even 19 years ago it was plain to see
that Peter’s IQ boiled water. He was at the top of his class at Stanford Law
School. For fun, he had started a conservative/libertarian campus magazine
called The Stanford Review.
At the time, Peter aspired to
be a Supreme Court justice. Instead, he co-founded PayPal and became a
billionaire. Ah, darn. Peter now directs his bottomless intellectual curiosity
to global economics and politics and the investment opportunities created at
these intersections.
Much of what Peter told me
yesterday was off the record. But he did share his deceptively simple
investment map. Draw two circles that overlap a little bit. Call once circle
“great businesses.” Call the other circle “businesses nobody likes.” The
overlap is where you’ll find great investment opportunities.
This makes Peter a
contrarian. He also has a fine market timing sense. He correctly called the
multiyear dollar slide in 2004. I wish I had.
Peter is a libertarian who
supported Ron Paul in the recent Republican primary. We had some fun discussing
why it is that supply-siders and libertarians tend to be optimistic types. How
odd it is, Peter mused, that the U.S. is moving sharply away from
libertarianism and toward statism, yet the most optimistic investors tend to be
supply-siders and libertarians! It’s the Kudlow Conundrum, we agreed, named
after that indefatigable optimist Larry Kudlow.
Here are Clarium’s top
holdings as of Q4 2007, according to Ticker Spy (http://www.tickerspy.com/member.php?mid=-1282816&pid=22301)
Can mere mortals achieve
returns comparable to Clarium's? Or must one be a real genius, like Peter
Thiel?
Check out Rich’s blog:
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/
HEAR RICH KARLGAARD SPEAK AT TELECOSM
2008
www.TelecosmConference.com
__________________________________________
Readings /
The New Economics of Semiconductor
Manufacturing
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may08/6179
Bernanke's Bubble Laboratory
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121089412378097011.html?mod=hpp_us_whats_news
Smoothing Out Nano Edges
http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech/20761/
Vodafone Buys Zyb for $49M
http://gigaom.com/
Whole-Body Gaming
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20717/
__________________________________________
Friday Letter Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
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