President's Message

Like trees falling in the wilderness, date codes passed from 99 to 00 on January 1st without much ado. Except for a few ATM crashes and some excessive overdue book fines, the only segment of the economy facing a return to 1900 levels were Y2K recruiting firms.

So, what happened to the Y2K bug? Although many computers indeed failed to roll over their clocks at midnight, there were two little-reported strategies that successfully fooled them into thinking that it didn't make any difference. One was to label the Y2K rollover as the "millennium bug", which made many PCs think the real crisis was still a year away; and the other was "event profiling," which works by taking everything that was occurring just before New Year's day, and successfully recreating it on New Year's day. Widespread use of the latter strategy was evident on CNN, which proclaimed universal optimism for real progress in the next millennium, while promoting
yet another interview with Monica Lewinsky for Saturday afternoon. Since these programming strategies were performed without public announcement, I have recently taken out relevant patents, and will start invoicing every company that implemented them.

Chips ahoy!

If you're relatively new to computing, you may not have heard much about AMD. But for PC clone makers, Advanced Micro Devices has been a distant drummer to Intel for three decades. Always a niche player, AMD produced a line of processors that mimicked Intel's at every notch up the x86 architectural scale. Intel managed to stay ahead by moving into ever faster architectures and aggressively cutting prices for the chips that fell behind. Then, with the Pentium line of processors, Intel created a proprietary product name that made AMD seem like a cheap imitation.

But AMD kept coming back, and continues to compete head-to-head in processor speed and performance with its powerful rival. Much of this perseverence is credited to founder and CEO Walter Jeremiah Sanders III ("King Jerry"), who started out with Intel, shared some of their patents, and like Rambo, takes the rivalry personal. Now, as the PC market heats up, eight of the top ten PC
manufacturers, most notably Compaq and Gateway, are turning to AMD for at least part of their product line. Last April, AMD's share of the US retail PC market had risen to 40.5% from 25.4% the previous year, while Intel's share had dropped from 71.9% to 53.2% during the same period.

As debate swirls over Microsoft's dominance in software, it is instructive to note how competition has helped keep prices down in PC hardware. Although Intel has remained preeminent, it has kept its lead only through price cutting and repeated innovation. While the price of a Windows upgrade seems stuck around $89, the cost of a cutting-edge, screamingly-fast PC with all the accouterments has plunged from more than $2000 to around $750 and change. And while Intel has had to cut its margins to stay competitive, look what they've saved in legal expenses.

AMD has recently announced its latest and best technology, the new 800 MHz Athlon chip. This product is described in company literature as "the world's first seventh-generation x86 processor featuring a superpipelined, nine-issue superscalar microarchitecture optimized for high clock frequency . . ." If this seems unIntelligible to you, come to the next DACS meeting on February 1, to hear AMD's representative put it all in plain English, and show you how much faster and better you could have done it if you had been a bit slower to upgrade your PC.

--Allan Ostergren
dacsprez@aol.com