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Infinite Curiosity

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Category Archives: trends

Does an $intc short make sense?

30 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by Grynn in finance, tech, trading, trends

≈ Leave a comment

Job postings suggest Amazon is planning to make its own ARM-based servers.

Google eyes Power chips

Software Engineer, ARM Server ($FB)

Looks like everyone is evaluating ARM servers; makes sense to me. Small, cheap servers that can saturate a 100Mbps network connection…

I think $INTC is under attack on all fronts:

Servers: ARM could make serious inroads (classic Clayton Christensen, the innovation looks like a toy, flies under the price umbrella till it’s too late for the incumbent, who cannot (or will not) self-cannibalize based on something that looks like a toy …)

Mobile: $QCOM, $AAPL, SMSN:LI rule here…

Desktop/Notebook: As I posit in my last article, $AAPL may make a move here (or not). But the fundamental thesis is the same. Desktops will move to from the Core variants to the Atom variants. They’re nearly good enough now. $MSFT providing Windows free for low-end boxen? It’ll only add to the fire.

If the move from Core/Xeon series is towards Atom – it will margin compression. If it’s towards ARM, it will mean substantial loss of market share. And $INTC is now setup to be a player at scale. Not sure if they can compete like a scrappy little startup anymore. I wonder if that’s left in the DNA?

As a long term $INTC fan – nearly every compute device I’ve bought had Intel Inside, this marks the end of an era to me….

When will the transition be visible in stock prices? Is much of this already priced in?

With $INTC trading near the top of it’s 52W range ($27.24) I think the risk (for a short) is quite low. Say about $4  = 15% ($31), which is where many analysts are calling it. The gain could easily be $7 = 26% ($20). I think it’s time to nibble a bit…

Red:

Short interest seems to be under 1% of the float, why is it so low?

PE ratio is just 14; multiple expansion is easily possible if $INTC shows signs of life in the mobile space. $INTC has been talking about a better radio, which seems to be a key weakness for them….

There could be a revival in the desktop space (unlikely IMHO).

The main risk I see is that the move could take longer than I can hold … will a move take more than a year?

Amber:

I just love the Xeon Phi (in abstract terms). Can’t see the whole point of Tesla/GPU compute if you can do cheap enough, dense enough full-featured cores. A whole bunch of ‘em. But then there’s the fun projects like Parallella. The software effort required for to write apps for GPU compute languages has never made sense to me.

Green:

NUC is a joke.

Atom in the Datacenter means severe margin compression. ‘Course an Atom doesn’t measure up to the raw compute of the Core / Xeon E series … but then the price differential is substantial.

What’s the $INTC bull case?

1) Success in mobile – scaling down the Ivy-Bridge architecture to be competitive in the 2W TDP space.

I think $INTC is competitive already – but it’s not leading to design wins because:

1.1) Low-end is extremely price-conscious; INTC realistically has not much   chance of competing in this space. Sure they can ‘bribe’ companies (contra-revenue as they’re calling it) to use INTC, but I think this is akin to buying eyeballs….pointless in the medium term.

1.2) High-end, there’s no market outside of AAPL, SMSN and neither is going to use INTC at the moment. Perhaps Nokia (err… Microsoft Mobile Oy) may give it a shot? Lenovo? maybe, but really I can’t see a third player (at any scale) for at least the next few years.

Can INTC use the leverage it has – in terms of desktop/server to bully Apple? Don’t think so — Apple is perhaps one the largest single customers for INTC, they need Apple more than Apple need INTC.

2) Datacenter growth continues un-abated, with Intel continuing to rule the roost, picking up another couple of percent in terms of market-share by destroying what little remains of AMD?

I certainly think Datacenter will continue to grow pretty fast. The cloud is more important than ever. Indeed INTC bet that growth in mobile would require equivalent growth in datacenter and the margins in datacenter were much fatter….(find quote from outgoing INTC CEO here…). Is the relationship linear?

Shiny apples

12 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by Grynn in finance, trading, trends

≈ Leave a comment

[Edit: 17-Apr-2012, scuttlebutt is the iPhone 6 will cost $100 more than the iPhone 5s (retail) and that Apple is asking telcos to absorb some of this increase, to which there is some push-back. See bottom of post for more analysis.]

Idle speculation, whilst on the treadmill ….

Where could $AAPL be planning to use its Sapphire? (too much smoke for there not to be a fire; Apple’s planning something to do with Sapphire, but what?)

1) iPhone screen – ok, so every other dude and his dog, thinks this is the plan.

Criticisms: It’s too expensive – about 10x the cost of Gorilla Glass ($GLW) they say

It’s too heavy, denser than Gorilla Glass….

It’s harder, but not more shatter proof. It’ll scratch less but may not be more durable.

It’s less transparent.

So assuming all of the above is true to some degree:

It’s heavier, less transparent, at greater risk of shattering and costs 10x more –> but is much more scratch-resistant. There’s some scepticism…but is it a case of hater’s gonna hate?

2) iPhone Back – no one’s saying this (at least no one I’ve heard as yet …)

iPhone backs (the metal bits) are what seems to get scratched the most; a very thin sheet of Sapphire coating the back would make it super-awesome. Shatter-resistance would come from being bonded to the metal underneath?

3) Trackpads – Sapphire is insanely smooth; much much smoother than glass. Fingers glide so much more freely.

Not as big as screens. Less to worry about in terms of weight and transparency. Perhaps it’s trackpads on MacBooks?

4) Some new device altogether – perhaps some kind of remote….?

Go on, tell me what you think ….leave a comment….

Cloud Storage

19 Wednesday May 2010

Posted by Grynn in lifehack, tech, trends

≈ Leave a comment

[EDIT: Update]

Wrote this post thinking about Google Docs. Turns out Google is copying Amazon and has come out with its own “Google Storage for Developers”. Basically identical to Amazon, just that it costs $0.17 per GB per month instead of the $.20 per GB per month that Amazon charges. Data transfer in and out costs a heck of a lot of money, especially to-from APAC ($0.30 / GB)!

Which means running your own storage server (in a well built and well managed data-center) is probably the best bet. A decent server with decent storage say, 2Terabytes of disk (1TB x2) costs about $100 per month which is … $0.1 GB/month with RAID level 1 – Mirroring or $0.5 per GB/month with RAID level 0 – striping. In all practicality there will be no further data-transfer charges.

‘Course you have run your own linux distro, but you can choose whatever super cool filesystem you want. If you use Kimsufi.co.uk you can run Proxmox VE (or VMWare or Hyper-V) + a pre-packaged appliance like Openfiler.

[EDIT: Original Post continues]

Google is nearly an order of magnitude cheaper than Amazon S3 for cloud storage!

  • Google: Max 1GB, Crappy interface for large files, tools ecosystem not as rich as S3.
    • 80 Gb for $20 p.a (see: https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage?hl=en)

  • Amazon S3: Max 5Gb per file. Decent tools. Have to pay for good usermode filesystems. EBS allows you to easily store/mount true-crypt encrypted volumes.
    • 80 Gb for $192 p.a (full redundancy)
    • 80 Gb for $96 p.a (reduced redundancy storage)

And Google has no data-transfer charges … which can be very, very substantial! Amazon is free for inbound data till June 2k10 …

I think I’m going to start transitioning my content from S3 to Google. Going to try and store my everyday desktop as a VM image – let’s see how that goes.

BTW: Noticed that Reliance has substantially lower latency than Tata when it comes to international bandwidth. Round-trip times under a 100ms for servers in Paris/London. Which means remote desktop may actually be usable. I remember a senior (and brilliant, though understated) colleague, saying that anything under 200ms is ok for UI tasks … (this is when I was developing embedded devices and we were trying to work out how fast we needed the processor to be …). Methinks Tata goes via SGP => TKY => NYK to reach LDN (they acquired Tyco). Reliance on the other hand owns FLAG and can go via the Middle East. When I’m next on a Tata line, I’ll check out ping times to NYK. Should be about the same either way to NYK (~250ms), but LDN should be 400ms via Tata if I’m right.

I think Amazon has servers in SGP. I think Google is more of HKG play – which will add some 50ms to round-trip times.

The Fourth Estate

05 Monday Apr 2010

Posted by Grynn in culture, trends

≈ Leave a comment

While WIMWI Profs go on and on about the poor quality of reporting in India, no one seems to notice the astoundingly poor quality of reporting in the UK.

See http://bit.ly/9hZhsJ. Now read the realz here: http://bit.ly/d6ipTn  and checkout http://bit.ly/9z9sLu

It has begun ….

29 Monday Mar 2010

Posted by Grynn in finance, trends

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

avc, BRIC, fred wilson, investing

The globalization of the internet …

  • Google: 890mm worldwide visitors, 745mm non US – 84% non US
  • Facebook: 471mm worldwide visitors, 370mm non US – 78% non US
  • Twitter: 74mm worldwide users, 53mm non US – 72% non US

The BRIC countries are going to be the most important markets going forwards…. now is the time to invest in Internet properties in India/China etc. Properties with an Indian focus like say Rediff.com are going to be increasingly important, possibly more important than Facebook and Twitter in the coming decade.

All your base….

Note: stats nicked from a post by Fred Wilson who is superb at detecting trends before they’re "trendy”.

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