Xilinx recently put out a press release publicizing their partnership with Sun Microsystems. The frustrating part of the release is it accentuates Xilinx inability to articulate its platform strategy. An excerpt from EE Times (a pretty techy organization) coverage of the press release illustrates this.
Xilinx said in a statement. “The microprocessor industry is steadily shifting towards CMT architectures”… It is thought that Knudsen was referring to processors that support multiple threads of computation on a single chip as in chip-multi-threading (CMT) but the acronym was not expanded.
I have a fairly good mental library of acronyms, but “CMT” isn’t one I readily recognize. When technical publications struggle to decipher a company’s lingo it indicates the company has some work to do in the marketing department. Xilinx has a very enviable position that they are struggling to leverage or communicate.
The PLD (Programmable Logic Device) industry badly needs to create a “Web 2.0″ type marketing headline that can energize engineers, designers, managers, and venture capitalists. Otherwise PLDs may stagnate in their current niche with market adjacencies continuing to be dominated by ASSPs (Application Specific Standard Products). Potential alone isn’t a recipe for success. People need inspiration to change habits away from the traditional approach.
