Tag: delays

Manufacturers despair of Microsoft

Posted on December 24, 2014 by - News

Microsoft campusA company based in Seattle that is launching an operating system next year is not getting a positive vote from hardware companies desperate to sell more kit.

Microsoft is introducing an operating system next year called Windows 10 that is already delayed and will be free of charge to anyone who has made the mistake of instaling or buying Windows 8.1.

Microsoft is jumping from Windows 8 to Windows 10, ignoring the number nine, purely for marketing reasons.

But according to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, PC vendors in the country are shaking their heads because they don’t feel that people will spend money on new kit.

It quotes vendors as saying that Microsoft’s partnerships with Oracle and VM Ware will also adversely affect PC hardware vendors.

To read between the lines, it seems that the hardware vendors are telling the rather ancient Microsoft that it’s history.

Intel Braswell delays all about cost

Posted on December 3, 2014 by - News

979583-scroogeIntel has been doing its best to explain why its Braswell chip has been delayed.

For those who came in late, Braswell was supposed to be a 1Q 2015 launch, but it kept being delayed. The latest news is that it will not be seen in the shops until June and August 2015.

Kirk  Skaugen,  who heads up the company’s PC Client Group said the main reason was cost.

Intel has been having problems getting its 14 nanometer manufacturing technology to yield at economically acceptable levels. Although the company describes the current yield rate of its 14 nanometer technology as being in a “healthy range,” Intel indicated that the yields still are not where the prior generation technology was at this stage of its ramp.

Broadwell costs will actually remain higher than those for the 22 nanometer Haswell family of products until the third quarter of 2015.

This is all very tricky considering that Braswell is intended to be a very low-cost part for entry-level desktops and notebooks. While Intel can take a couple of quarters of elevated costs to get Broadwell right for the higher-value segments of the PC business, it has the luxury of waiting until Braswell’s manufacturing costs are lower than last year’s 22 nanometer Bay Trail’s costs for more cost-sensitive PCs.

Intel has been all about platform cost reduction with Bay Trail-M/D and has been working to reduce the platform bill of materials costs for its Bay Trail-M/D products. Since the low-end PC market is focused more on cost than on performance, these Bay Trail products may continue to hold their own against AMD’s newly announced Carrizo-L until Braswell arrives.