Bill,
Intel's done about all the can do in terms of holding the industry hostage.. anymore and the boxmakers will revolt.. they aren't stupid.. while they know that people want Intel Inside, they don't like the Intel monopoly..
I look at the future 2 years like this..
You sound like an AMD fan, so take some of this with a grain of salt, I might be wrong about my initial view of AMD.. only time will tell, but to be honest I don't like "uncle jerry".. and therefore don't trust him.
From an investing standpoint he has given me little reason to trust him.. everything since the K5 has been late, bugged or had yield problems.. good chips yes, but I am really interested in the K7.. The K7 is AMD's make or break chip. The K7 will show how well AMD has adpated the Nexgen technology to fit into their designs. So for now I put AMD on an increase market share of maybe 5%..
Cyrix: Now here is a company I have like since the introduction of the 5x86. While the 5x86 didn't make much of a splash in terms of sales and was late to market, it was techincally impressive and truely a fifth generation processor (pipelined, multi-issue). They got points for that (in my mind). Now the 5x86 core is driving the MediaGX (a chip that has 50M units a year potential starting in mid 1998 btw).
Then they get bought by NSM who has publically said they are hooked up with: TSMC and UMC.... not to mention IBM ME and their own fabs.. I don't know about you, but if I was Andy Grove I would be dumping in my shorts. The reason: Cyrix has always had good designs, but have not been able to get the clock speeds up recently. NSM's specialy, well that's getting clock rates up.. perfect fit..
Now for IDTI.. they will be a niche player and will no ammount to anything until they either a) beef up the chip with more power or b) add mediaGX type components to it.
Intel.. I see Intel losing 5% market share total this year, with 3% going to AMD, 1.5% going to Cyrix. The remaining .5% going to a split of late year IDTI sales and IBM ME sales. Next year I see Intel losing another 10%.
Intel's bragging point used to be that they were technically superior to everyone else. Well that advantage (I used to be an Intel fan, when there was a reason to be proud to own Intel) has disappeared. I am cheering for AMD and Cyrix.. I don't really care which, but will say this, in my view AMD is hampered by it's current management. They need a change.
Intel is also going to lose 20% of motherboard chipset sales in the next year as they do a "hard shift" to slot 1 and the market says "I don't think so" and sticks with socket 7 (or it's varient). All in all, by the end of 98 Intel revenues should be down 40% (market share + lower ASP).
Steve |
