AM signals: MIPS turns 30, PC sales and ‘misery index’ plummet, GM sells vaporware?

Worldwide PC shipments totaled 71.9 million units in the fourth quarter of 2015 (4Q15), a year-on-year decline of -10.6%, according to the International Data Corp. (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker. Although total shipments were in line with already conservative expectations, the news nonetheless ended 2015 as the first year below 300 million units since 2008. The holiday quarter achieved a modest uptick compared to the third quarter, but the year-on-year decline in 2015 shipments was nevertheless the largest in history, surpassing the decline of -9.8% in 2013. Robert McMillan in the Wall Street Journal writes, “The forces aligned against the PC industry amounted to a triple whammy: an economic slowdown in China, a strong U.S. dollar that made computers more costly in Europe, and the inexorable growth of smartphones and other mobile devices.”

The MIPS architecture, now the domain of Imagination Technologies Ltd., is 30 years old. Alexandru Voica, “A decade before IBM launched the world’s first smartphone, a team of Stanford University researchers and Silicon Valley veterans came together to design a microprocessor architecture that would forever change the landscape of computing. The year was 1986 and the newly-formed company was MIPS Computer Systems Inc.—a small start-up led by current-day Stanford University president John L. Hennessy. Read the story here. In related news, Electronics Weekly reports that Imagination Technologies has launched two GPUs as the next evolution of its Rogue architecture for graphics.

Good news—the “industry index” has plummeted. Invented by former Brookings economist Arthur Okun in the 1970s, the index combines the unemployment rate with the inflation rate. Over the past year, it has been at its lowest levels since the 1950s, according to calculations by Brookings Senior Fellow Gary Burtless. The Index stood at 5.5 in November 2015 and averaged 5.37 over the period January-November 2015. It reached an all-time high, 21.98, during the final year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is not impressed with GM’s $500 million investment in Lyft. He writes, “Let’s see: Ride-sharing is largely an urban phenomenon, but congested urban settings will not soon be hospitable to robot cars. Autonomous vehicles will be practical sooner in exurban environments, particularly on the freeway, but these environments don’t fit the ride-sharing business model. In short, GM and Lyft are selling vaporware for the more gullible sort of tech geek.”