How can you say it doesn't look good when you are only "in the process" of obtaining the documents ? I would think that you would have to see them, and have knowledge of the Pentium chips, before you could come to such a conclusion.
The pressure is on, clearly, but your conclusion seems premature.
I agree with you, however, that DEC means business. But I am amazed that DEC and Palmer seem to be taking the August WSJ article and blowing it way out of proportion and out of context. Also, I have a feeling that they won't be able to substantiate the Intel-Alpha connection. It was generally accepted until just this year, and possibly even now, that the Alpha always has been a technically superior chip. Intel's strength, easily verified, is in marketing and in the lock that the X86 instruction set [which predates Alpha by a decade] has on the market, NOT in the technology.
As for the fact that performance is encroaching on Alpha, this is largely due to increasing clock speeds. Two years ago, I used a 33 Mhz 386 then 486. Now Intel introduces a 266 MHz P2. Of course the performance is dramatically higher. But the clock speed increases are due to geometry reduction, getting down to .35 micron, .25 and later .18 and .13. This has nothing to do with DEC or Alpha.
It's not at all clear to me that Intel is in as bad a shape as you seem to have concluded. |
