Robert Pogson

There’s news that global corporations with headquarters in USA are asking for a tax holiday on money earned outside the USA returned to the USA. They want the 35% tax rate normally applied to be reduced to 5%. The hope is that this will result in the money being reinvested to create new jobs in the USA.

I know a bit of maths and I figure that, if M$ moved 90% of its employees to Mumbai, India, brought the profits home and paid less tax, the measure would actually reduce jobs in the USA. What am I missing? M$ pays about $4 or $5billion per year income tax in USA. If they exported jobs, probably to lower wage countries like India or China, they would have lower costs and pay lower taxes under this measure… Hmmm.

see Apple, Google, Microsoft seek gargantuan tax break

Congress debates jobs and Jobs

Certainly Intel has a larger presence in servers than the upstart, Tilera, but Tilera has a better product due to sample next month

• in performance/W, and
• performance/$

Their new product has 36 ARM cores and two nifty DDR3 memory controllers giving a lot of throughput for very little power consumption. They can match a Sandy Bridge 8 core chip at 2.8gHz with 36 ARMed cores at 1.2gHz. Their next product up the pipe will give 2.5X as much performance for about the same power consumption. These chips will be very useful for folks who have maxed out space or power in the server room or for folks who just want the most power they can pack into a given space or budget.

see Tilera throws gauntlet at Intel’s feet

Customers are already lining up for the chips.

UPDATE There’s a more in-depth article on this subject at Thinq.

Tilera feels they have a solution that scales better than Intel or AMD’s ring-interconnection of cores. They have 100 and 200 cores on the roadmap.