Broadcom: The $600 Billion AI Chip Giant

"A publicly traded private equity fund masquerading as a semiconductor company." That gave me the aha! moment.

7:26 I took that background photo 😮 What a surpris

6:01 Their blockbuster product was indeed a clock generator replacing multiple crystals, but not exactly in the way described. It was a programmable RF PLL frequency generator, which was able to generate several different user selectable pixel clocks for a videocard, while using a single crystal as a reference. Most of their products at the time were focused on video and audio generation for personal computers and professional video gear.

Agilent’s layoffs in 2002-2003 were odd. I was one of those laid off, even though our group was making 50% profit year after year. But, alas, we were part of a division that was doing poorly. So everybody had to share in the pain “of being workforce managed.” Struck me as illogical given the success of the group I was in.

What got Agilent is the same thing that sunk Nortel. There was a major slowdown in telecom expenditures on equipment starting in early 2001. Everything got overbuilt and new technologies squeezed even more bandwidth from existing infrastructure (mostly fibre). So aglient starting pushing inventory into their distribution channels, this is called stuffing the channel.. At the time this could be recorded as revenue because the product had shipped even though it had not been paid for. So along comes the next quarter and Agilents distributors tell them their warehouses are full so Agilent slashes prices and offers credit deals to carriers with low or no interest. They clean out the channel (at a loss) and then push more inventory into it. Well eventually no one wants any more hardware period. Nortel was the first to blink and announce they were taking a one time charge which was due to dead inventory. Soon other players followed suit and that was the death of Nortel and drove others into either bankruptcy or right next to it. In the aftermath I can remember seeing cellular infrastructure for sale at about 10% of its original value.

I hope you're doing well. When I heard about the earthquake I got worried.

Hearing about Seagate got their SSD business from LSI is an amazing things. This channel is like a "behind-the-scenes" curtain look at all the actual chips and systems LTT (and others) review and play with. Another excellent video Asianometry!

Broadcom try to make functional non-android drivers challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

it's also a hedge fund nowadays, too

There's one more step to the Braedcom cycle of buying a company and then slimming it down by selling parts. They also massively increase prices as seen with VMware recently

You seem to have missed the entire history of Broadcom Corporation, founded in 1991. Lot's of history here prior to the Avago and Tan Hock days.

24:42 Best meme quote yet from Asianometry 😂

This was so well done and contextualizes everything I've heard about Broadcomm into a 25 minute video. Well done!

It is mind numbing to see where HP is today. Used to work for them just after they peaked and starting that downward slide.

Always wondered how Google made its first chips so fast and successful. Never realized that Google's TPU was actually Broadcom, it makes so much sense now.

Observation: The odd company on the list of the top 12 companies displayed at 0:12 is Saudi Aramco (#4) with share price under $9, while the rest listed are all above $140. It's also a non-tech company in a tech dominated list.

It's not that long ago, that VMWare could've acquired Broadcom and not the other way around...

Love your content and appreciate your hard work!!!!

Excellent conclusion and analysis, Jon!

Nice to see how some of your previous videos ended, with this video, in a small saga.