back to article Pre-holiday chip sales go flat

Global semiconductor sales as the world entered the 2010 holiday season, according to new data released by the Semiconductor Industry Association. The softening in revenues across all types of chips was inevitable given the massive recovery that the business had in 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession. Don't get the wrong …

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  1. Squirrel
    Troll

    sack of innovation

    in the market at both ends of the scale... IC to device is seriously limiting consumer interest in <£300 range IMHO.

    Tablets have been around forever and the iPad made them cool, 3D everything has been around since near the end of CRT monitors (2000) and now LCD et al. are only just fast enough to do it again but it's still as bad as it ever was. MPC are just old tech/bin clearers with down scaled CPUs, and there's nothing new from phones.

    From a PC peripheral stand point I'd like to see better flash based products, faster and higher resolution displays and an advancement in 3D PP rendering such as raytracing in games instead of DirectX9/10/11 GPGPU nonsense. Scrap the x86 instruction set whilst you're at it and move to UEFI in the same go (Win8 motivator maybe?).

  2. Eddy Ito
    Grenade

    All well and nice

    It's a pretty chart and all but I didn't see where it shows what dollars they are using. Certainly I presume it's US dollars but since it isn't mentioned which US dollars I can only assume they use dollars of the day. While, as I mentioned, that makes for a pretty chart, it doesn't account for inflation as it would if it were normalized to November 2010 dollars or January 2000 dollars.

    Given the 2010 dollar is about 70.5 cents in 1996 US money, it makes the numbers somewhat less impressive and would indicate the relatively flat Y/Y period just before the "massive hole" may well have been, shall we say, flirting with negative territory. Granted, I'm sure it likely wasn't wallowing in the red between '05 and '08 but it isn't the long and slow upward march it appears.

    Likewise, if you happen to be one who agrees with the US BLS and believes inflation was negative in 2009 and saw your dollars go farther than they did the year before, the "massive hole" isn't quite so deep but that news doesn't make the fall any nicer. Finally, celebrations of the rocket ride to the Everest like post hole peak were clearly premature and perhaps we are just coming back to the new normal of growth that, if we're lucky, will keep pace with inflation.

  3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Linux

    Flogging a nearly dead horse?

    IMHO, the market has shifted and Intel & AMD have lost the plot.

    Let me explain my thoughts.

    ARM is where it's at in the consumer end of things. Sure people are buying Desktops (diminshing numbers) and Laptops (taking over from desktops) but more and more bits of the end user experience can be done on SmartPhones & Tablets.

    Then the likes of Microsoft & Amazon and uncle tom cobble and all are moving us (wether we like it or not) towards a 'Cloudy' solution and rented apps.

    I think that the middle ground is being pulled from under their collective backsides.

    So a home user will maybe have a NAS or some other server for their Media streaming etc and the rest of the household can enjoy email and web browsing on SmartPhones & Tablets.

    Where is the market for the latest Intel thingamyjig?

    Dow mention gamers. They are a miniscule % of the overall market.

    IMHO, I think that Intel & Apple should concentrate on making superfast & power efficient SERVER chips. These don't need no stinking graphics on the die unless they are for media servers where the GPU is used for 1080p & higher decompression.

    In many respects, a dual core Atom with the nvidia ION chipset that can do 1080p decompression is already here. Unless they can get the Power consumption down by more than 50% then why bother upgrading?

    Naturally everything will run Linux under the covers so Microsoft are nowhere in my perfect universe

    Oh well, back to reality tomorrow.

  4. John Savard

    Eventful? Wrong Color.

    If one looks at the blue line instead of the red line, one can see what is really happening. There had been, some time in 2008, I think, a big crash in demand for chips, and after that point there was a rapid recovery. The recovery having reached a new, higher plateau, growth won't continue at the same rapid pace, and so naturally the rate of growth is going to slow down a lot.

    That isn't bad news of a disastrous drop in demand, it's just what can be expected now that demand has returned to normal levels.

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