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- THE FRIDAY LETTER -
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for friends and subscribers)
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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 353.0/August 29,
2008
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / Competitive it is
- Friday Feature / Heard at Hot
Chips
- Friday Blogger Bonus / The Micro-blogging Movement
- Readings /
The Week / Competitive it is
Hance Haney, Disco-tech blog: My
colleague George Gilder and I have completed a paper, entitled “More Broadband,
Increased Choice and Lower Prices Begin with Regulatory Reform.” We examine
various shortcomings in telecom regulation in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and
Wisconsin as a result of robust competition. We explain why regulation and
competition don't mix, and offer legislators specific ideas for regulatory
reform.
A chart, which appears in the
paper, projects the growth in competition from cell phones and Internet
Protocol-enabled voice services provided by cable operators. The curve is in
the shape of a hockey stick.
Phone competition from cable
operators took off beginning in 2004 as a result of the FCC scaling back its
wholesale competition rules. Those changes prompted phone companies to enter
the video market dominated by cable operators, who in turn accelerated their
entry into the voice market dominated by incumbent phone companies.
When the 1996 law passed,
several cable operators planned to offer competitive phone services in a
venture that included Sprint Corp. But according to Sprint CEO William T.
Esrey, the plans were dropped because of the FCC’s “pro-competition” policies:
“If we provided telephony service over cable, we recognized that they would
have to make it available to competitors.” Thus, the local competition rules
which were intended to speed effective competition actually delayed it.
Consumers also began
substituting cell phones for fixed line service in greater numbers beginning in
approximately 2004. During the Clinton administration, additional spectrum was
auctioned for cell phone services and state regulation was preempted. Service
quality steadily improved and prices steadily dropped, both as a result of
these policies and technological innovation. Cell phone service -- which was
once expensive and unreliable -- is increasingly becoming a compelling
alternative to fixed line phone service. Also, at the end of 2003 the FCC
mandated wireline-to-wireless number portablility -- enabling you to cancel
your fixed line phone service and transfer your wireline phone number to a cell
phone.
The point is that it is time
to reform telecom regulation. The phone company which Lily Tomlin
("Ernestine") lampooned (e.g., "We're the phone company;
we're omnipotent.") on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In program that aired on
NBC from 1968 to 1973 no longer exists.
Read More Broadband, Increased Choice and Lower Prices
Begin with Regulatory Reform, by George Gilder and Hance Haney:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=2361
|
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 Feature / Heard at Hot Chips
20 Years of What Worked and
What Didn't in CPU Architecture
Ron Wilson, Electronic Design, Strategy, News (8/26/08): You might imagine that
somewhere in a back room at conferences the old hands at microprocessor
architecture get together over dinner and a few bottles of wine--the sort that
must be concealed in expense reports--lean back in their chairs, and talk long
into the night about lessons learned and lessons repeated. Last night the
minority of Hot
Chips attendees who stayed around after dinner had the privilege of
listening in on just such a discussion, staged as a panel.
And an august group is it was. Chaired by [Gilder Telecosm Forum’s] Nick Tredennick, who has been in
microprocessor design since the Motorola 68000 development, the panel included
Insight 64 analyst Nathan Brookwood, Intel vice president and low-power
processor pioneer Dave Ditzel, Techvision principal and MIPS pioneer John
Mashey, the legendary Berkeley professor and RISC champion David Patterson,
former Intergraph guru Howard Sachs of Telarity, and Microprocessor Report
founder Michael Slater. As Tredennick said in his opening remarks, "these
men need no introduction—if you don't recognize them, just ask your parents."
Setting the tone, Tredennick characterized the industry has having been
"fooled by randomness." Architecture is not a science, he argued,
because it has only self-validation. "An architect creates a new
architecture, and then we let him tell us about all its advantages and conceal
all its problems. It's like trying to form an opinion of kids by asking their
parents. We should be asking the neighbors."
The tone of the panel remained similarly light. But inevitably, when people
of this caliber get together, some profound thoughts precipitated out of the
levity. And given the diversity of experience on the panel, their observations
were remarkably consistent. Taken together, they could almost form a little
handbook of how to, and not to, do a CPU architecture.
Perhaps the first point on which many of the panelists remarked was the
inverse correlation--or perhaps, after anti-x86 bias is removed, lack of
correlation--between architectural elegance and market success in the processor
world. (Given their backgrounds, the panelists focused on the PC and server
processing world, not the embedded space.) Hardly anyone would consider the x86
instruction set architecture to be pleasant, let alone elegant, but it has
utterly dominated the market. In fact one of the lessons many of the panelists
cited was a simple truth: don't go up against x86.
Another key point was the persistence of software. Noting that C, now an
ancient language, had defeated all attempts to supplant it, and that some
applications still used FORTRAN, Mashey observed "Chips come and go, but
software is forever." To apply this aphorism, he pointed out that a new
instruction set architecture requires someone to write new operating software,
and that is extremely hard and slow. "A really cool chip can mean there is
no software for it," Mashey said. Special mention in the category of
creating an impossible software problem was reserved for IBM's Cell processor,
which, Ditzel pointed out, has not one but two proprietary instruction sets on
one chip.
Another point made by the panelists is that, on the whole, the pursuit of
instruction-level parallelism had proved frustrating. Nearly a decade ago
academic researchers warned that the best average number of instructions per
clock on a broad mix of codes might be below 4, no matter how clever the
compiler technology. Ignoring this, CPU architects pushed for ever more
aggressive hardware, including wide instruction buffers, out-of-order
execution, branch prediction, and even speculative execution, to make the machines
capable of executing more and more instructions in parallel. The ultimate
expression of this trend was the long infatuation in some circles with VLIW
(very long instruction word) machines, in which the compiler bore almost all
the responsibility for recognizing and preparing instructions for parallel
execution, and parallel execution pipe numbers reached toward a dozen. But in
the end, the academics proved to have been correct. "I think we have to
call VLIW and superscalar approaches near misses," Patterson said.
In contrast, Patterson pointed out—and others agreed—that one concept that
had caught on was SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) instructions for
exploiting parallelism that lies in the data, rather than in the instruction
stream. Ditzel even suggested that vector processors, an elaboration on the
SIMD concept, might see a resurgence of interest as architects struggle to
exploit data parallelism while minimizing energy consumption.
The question of power—whether power density for thermal reasons or total
energy consumption for battery-life reasons—also marked a number of comments
during the discussion. Ditzel perhaps put it most succinctly: "The quest
for low power is driving a return to simplicity in processor
architecture." He pointed out, for example, that the just-announced Intel
Larrabee processor uses a simple, short execution pipeline based on a 1992
Pentium design—for power reasons.
Other panelists added to this point. Patterson cited superpipelining, in
which some architects claimed performance advantages for pipelines as long as
50 stages, as one of the conspicuous failures in the search for performance. He
observed that lately, pipelines have been getting shorter, not longer.
Brookwood said "performance/Watt considerations will bring us back to
using simple, in-order execution pipelines. We just can't afford the power
necessary to run all that extra hardware to manage out-of-order execution, and
to speculatively execute instructions that we will subsequently throw
away."
Instead, the panelists saw a return to simplicity
throughout the architectural world. The old debate between architects who
relied on complexity to execute ever more instructions per clock and those who
relied on simplicity to increase clock frequency seems to have finally been
resolved, in favor of simplicity. In the future, it was suggested, we will use
our growing transistor budgets to build lots of fast, simple machines with
aggressive, smart power management, rather than to build highly complex
machines. Moore's Law, which in the past conquered bipolar ECL, GaAs, and SiGe,
appears to have slain architectural complexity as well.
Check out Ron Wilson’s EDN blog:
http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=blog&blog_id=1690000169&blog_post_id=550032255
__________________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / The Micro-blogging Movement
Technology Review’s 2008 Young
Innovator:
In 2006, Jack Dorsey created Twitter so that he could let friends and family
know what he was doing, wherever he--or they--might be. Today more than two
million people use it to send out 140-character-or-fewer updates, called
"tweets," through Twitter's website or by text message over mobile
devices. Dorsey's ethos of simplicity shapes everything about Twitter, from the
application itself to the company's San Francisco offices (see "Home
Tweet Home," July/August 2008). Twitter's popularity has given rise
to an entire ecosystem of applications. Yet Dorsey, cofounder and now CEO of
the bemusing microblogging service, is secretive about how Twitter will ever
make money; critics say that's because its executives have no idea. What's not
a secret is that Twitter has had difficulties supporting its growing band of
obsessives: in recent months, twitterers have been frequently confronted by
error screens bearing messages such as "Twitter is stressing out a bit
right now."
Jason Pontin, TR's
editor in chief, recently chatted with Dorsey about these and other issues
using Twitter's @reply function, which directs a public message to a particular
user.
jason_pontin @jack Explain Twitter.
jack @jason_pontin Twitter is a real-time repository of
state for people, events, & things. A personal news wire of sorts.
jason_pontin @jack I twitter every day. But whenever I explain it
to people who've not, they are uncomprehending or angry. Why?
jack @jason_pontin People have to discover value for
themselves. Especially w/ something as simple & subtle as Twitter. It's
what you make of it.
jason_pontin @jack Critics say that tweets are trivial. Is that
missing the point?
jack @jason_pontin It depends on the context the recipient
brings. There's a universe in the smallest, most "trivial" details of
one's life.
jason_pontin @jack Even people who love Twitter are frustrated by
the service. It's broken far too often to feel reliable.
jack @jason_pontin We love what we're building & we
hate to see it suffer. Our goal is to make it reliable enough to be trusted as
a public good.
jason_pontin @jack Twitter also seems to lack basic stuff. I can't
organize my followers intelligently. Or search very well. When will Twitter
grow up?
jack @jason_pontin Unfortunately, we've neglected the user
experience to focus on stability of the foundation. We have designs to put this
right.
jason_pontin @jack You recently got $15 million from Spark Capital
and Bezos Expeditions. Will you buy some servers and infrastructure with that?
jack @jason_pontin I can't confirm the number, but I can
confirm we'll make the money work for our users (20 of whom happen to be our
investors)!
jason_pontin @jack What's Twitter's business model?
jack @jason_pontin We're building what we love. While we
have many ideas for sustainable revenue, Twitter's will emerge naturally from
our work.
jason_pontin @jack Sometimes it sounds like your monetization plan
is: let's get acquired by a communications company.
jack @jason_pontin We're not focused on answering that
question. We're determined to build a solid platform and service we can take
all the way.
Read “Home Tweet Home”:
https://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20942/?a=f
__________________________________________
Readings /
Five Ways Amazon Can Improve the Kindle 2.0
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/five-things-ama.html
Adaptec Buys Aristos Logic
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=162542&WT.svl=news1_4
Quantum Weirdness: Two Times Zero Doesn't Always Equal Zero
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aug08/6609
Rumors Surround Cisco & Brocade
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=162087
Dell's Net Slips Amid Push Into Asia
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121995360853280689.html?mod=2_1571_leftbox
Moving Security to the Cloud
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21303/?a=f
Samsung Issues Gloomy Profit Outlook
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121991996778679371.html?mod=2_1571_leftbox
__________________________________________
Friday Letter Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
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