The Dangers of Sibling Rivalry in the Mobile Processor Market

A long time ago, the word “Pentium” made geeks shake in excitement. For years Intel used the “Pentium” title to refer to their processor brand as a whole (and later – the upper-class of the  brand).  When you bought an Intel processor, you’d get a Pentium: Pentium 2/3/4, Pentium: Extreme Edition, Pentium D.  Now Pentium refers to Intel’s lower-end Core 2 Duo and later Core i7 brand; they’re the same die of the processor with half (or less) amounts of the ultra-speedy on-die L2 and L3 memory cache, effectively reducing performance markedly but making the processor cheaper and take up less power as a consequence.

Of course, you don’t hear about the Pentium much anymore. Instead, you hear about the Atom. This is unfortunately starting to turn out to be a problem for Intel.

M&A <3 Recessions.

Maybe it’s all the finance people I’m around right now, but M&A’s quickly taking over my econ-rants recently (especially those late at night over a few drinks with people who have no idea what I’m talking about). Mergers and acquisitions (ie: M&A) is definitely one of the sexier topics in corporate finance. The amount of money usually involved is probably the culprit: multi-million or billion dollar deals are pretty fun, especially if you’re the over-worked investment banker who’s getting a cut behind the scenes.

Theoretically, M&A should be picking up a lot in the next few months. With prospects good for economic improvement in the next fiscal year, some companies are more willing to spend cash to buy innovation rather than develop it in house. This take on the “Buy/Build” question probably has to do with the cost curves for firms in a recession.