Yes - by those with established businesses. I can't think of a startup that succeeded with an initial incremental, at lease since Amdahl. It's also hard to do an increment: the Intel teams are not dumb, and many could and have built far better processors than Intel has - but not while keeping compatibility and Intel's ROI and marketing and pricing structure. TransMeta tried - RIP.
There's also personal strategy involved. If we had done a better X86 we would have needed huge dollops of money to crack the front door of the market - c.f. TransMeta - and lost ownership of the company. By going for the disruptive approach we still own all of it - and funding rounds now are at a valuation that will keep us making our own mistakes, not someone else's. That matters to me, enough to go without paycheck for a decade. YMMV.
Aren't almost all the businesses mentioned here extinct, or at least have tiny chunks of the market?
Re:Mill Computing in 2017
by nickpsecurity on Friday January 13, 2017 @10:05AM
(#13391301)
More disruptive startups are. These were either running profitably or absolutely huge at one point. Blame AMD's and VIA's management for the rest on their end. ;)
Starting out in x86, AMD had a license from Intel.
Re:Mill Computing in 2017
by nickpsecurity on Thursday January 12, 2017 @09:24PM
(#13387938)
That justifies my use of it even more. Even with the license requirement, they still succeeded quite a bit. Even led on the 64-bit part since Intel screwed that up.
There's plenty of it on software side, too, with the proprietary DOS's and UNIX's. Foreign cloners stayed doing it with mainframes and embedded CPU's. So, incremental stuff (esp patented) can certainly grab market share and generate revenue. It's been going on for some time even in CPU market even with dominant players.