Brian,
I do understand your comment about the 8 million transistors, but I think it was phrased in a way that invited some obvious remarks. I believe you were trying to say that successfully doing a design with that many transistors should qualify the part as more than a Pentium substitute. I agree--it's a significant achievement for AMD. What it means to their bottom line in the long term remains to be seen.
I think the competition is good for Intel, but I don't give AMD very high marks otherwise. Trying to compare the two companies is futile--they're in different leagues.
Of course you're right about most analysts' knowledge of technial products, but don't count these guys out too quick. They reflect, in a general sense, the knowledge and perception that the public has about things technical, and it's the general public that's fueling the recent growth in the industry.
I mean, technically, what does "Intel Inside" mean? Not much. Financially, it means everything. So why even discuss things like CISC vs RISC, or cache buffer size, or number of transistors, etc? The bottom line is how much profit the company makes, and this seems to be strongly correlated to that "Intel Inside" sticker. For a company to successfully compete against Intel, they're going to have to overcome the brand loyalty, and that's going to be a lot more difficult and expensive than putting 8 million transistors on a chip.
Regards,
Len |
