I have quite a number of responses to this, most of which agreed with what
I felt that if the rumor is true, DEC may be selling out the farm. However,
a couple of respondents claimed that this was a false rumor, and a version
that actually makes sense from Dan Riley <dsr_at_mail.lns.cornell.edu>:
>The only version of this story that I've heard that makes any sense is
>the one reported by CNBC and the San Jose Mercury (which is a lot more
>likely to get tech stories right than the WSJ). Something like this
>also showed up on the newswires late yesterday attributed to anonymous
>sources at digital. It goes like this:
>
> - dec sells most of their fab capacity to intel
> - dec and intel cross-license their patents, settling the lawsuits
> - intel licenses the alpha chip designs and agrees to produce alphas
> for some number of years (dec has already licensed the designs to
> other fabs such as samsung)
> - intel grants dec some multi-year discounts
>
>dec retains ownership of the alpha chip architecture and continues to
>design new alphas, but gets out of the fab business--this puts them on
>the same footing as Sun and SGI. I have some doubts about the wisdom
>of this--alpha depends on bleeding edge fab to crank the clock speed,
>much more so than SPARC or MIPS--but it at least makes some sense,
>where the Wall Street Journal version made no sense at all.
There was one other response making guesses at DEC's business practices,
which on the surface may seem questionable, but may be rather shrewd.
Of course, that's just conjecture on the part of the author.
Still, one other respondent claimed that the Alpha is not the major
source of income for DEC, that its other products and services are.
Maybe, but without the Alpha, I think it will lose a big chunk of its
value.
If DEC is indeed cross licensing with Intel, I hope it doesn't end up on
the short end of the stick, as have happened to many small companies
that cross license their technology to giants.
eyc
Received on Wed Oct 08 1997 - 22:17:08 NZDT