Products > Test Equipment
Why did Tektronix stop making the great scopes?
Wuerstchenhund:
--- Quote from: nctnico on December 25, 2014, 02:14:51 pm ---
--- Quote from: Wuerstchenhund on December 25, 2014, 10:07:14 am ---I don't think that's true. For example, the original Pentium-M (Banias) saw "first silicon" in intel's Israel R&D fab in Haifa where the processor was also developed. The same is true for the mobile Core 2 (Merom) and Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge.
The truth is that without the R&D fabs in Israel there's a very good chance that intel would have become irrelevant in the general purpose CPU space.
--- End quote ---
IMHO it shows good management: don't put all your eggs in one basket and therefore have two seperate teams work on different strategies. The roles of the two team may as well have been reversed.
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Yes, if that were the case. The truth is however that there wasn't much forsight. Intel's US teams still clinged to Netburst long after it was clear to world and dog that the architecture was a failure, and only when (despite some overly optimistic marketing campaigns and borderline illegal incentives paid to system vendors) AMD successfuly ate away their market share in processors for notebooks, desktops and especially servers they started to realize what's wrong. The Pentium-M (Banias) was more or less a last-minute design, based on Haifa's experience with the P6 architecture for Timna (another of intels dead-ends).
Wuerstchenhund:
--- Quote from: Richard Crowley on December 25, 2014, 02:28:03 pm ---It is true that the low-power designs from the Haifa Design Center probably saved Intel's bacon and we wouldn't be here today without them.
However, the device development and process development has been based in Oregon since the late 1970s when the Logic Technology Development operation moved up from the Silicon Valley. At any given time we have 100s of people from all the high-volume manufacturing fabs all over the planet are here in Oregon to transfer each new process from D1 to their respective factories from Dalian to Leixlip and Kiryat Gat and points in between. The product development is done by groups in many places (like Haifa) using the design rules we develop for each succeeding process.
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Understandable, considering that general purpose CPUs are only a part of intel who also makes chipsets, network processors and adapters, WiFi controllers, Embedded stuff and much more.
The Netburst/P-M era stuck to my head as intel's processors were of particular relevance for my work at that time. That even included Itanium (another sad story).
Wuerstchenhund:
--- Quote from: N2IXK on December 25, 2014, 02:31:04 pm ---Because they are referring to "well logging" in the oil and gas industry, where analog TEK scopes were a well established standard, and are apparently still in demand (even the lousy 900 series stuff):
http://www.logwell.com/tech/oscilloscopes/Tek_T922R.html
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It's hard to believe that no-one has come up with a solution based on a modern DSO, which I'm sure would be much more reliable and economical than buying and canibalizing old analog bangers.
N2IXK:
I don't get it either. :-// But that industry seems to thrive on obsolescent technologies judging from the rest of the gear discussed on that site. An interesting niche area in electronics that not many are familiar with.
coppice:
--- Quote from: SL4P on December 24, 2014, 05:38:46 am ---Take a look at AMPEX in the same generation of companies - and a very similar outcome.
Interestingly - both companies had a very large stake in broadcast video equipment (SONY too), and they have all felt the earth move drastically since the mid-90s with the shift to digital technology.
Plenty of people pushed them t respond earlier in the 90s, but by then they were all dropping into the US groove of money-money-money / shareholder returns etc. Nothing to do with innovation. Sadly, as much as I loved all three - they got what they deserved.
--- End quote ---
Ampex is another company that was badly hit by the end of the cold war. Defence companies spent a lot of money on instrumentation tape systems from Ampex and a few others (e.g. Schlumberger and Honeywell), and that business collapsed with the Berlin wall.
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