Over time, the stock will reflect this.
They have an awesome chip "roadmap" demonstrating leadership but according to this guy it seems the trump card is a ways off in delivering $. The roadmap is getting complicated, so a question is how incremental to xeon's power are the interim 32bit devices. Wall street seems only to respond to whether the number met the average estimate or occasionally to a one quarter forward earning guidance so maybe this is no longer a relevant question!
"McKinley is going to be a more interesting processor than Merced," Slater said. "There will be [at first] systems with Merced built in modest volumes. You'll see Merced as the chip that gets the architecture started." But because companies such as Hewlett-Packard and IBM seem comfortable with existing workstation and server processors, they won't shift to Merced immediately, putting the processor "at the fringe of the market" during its early runs, he said.
By 2002, Intel said it hopes to have McKinley and Merced ported to 0.13-micron rules. That will add performance to the high end, but it will also lower costs to allow the IA-64 parts to begin attacking high-volume markets. By then, a larger share of workstation and server vendors might be ready to shift to a new processor architecture, Slater said.
"Realistically, it's going to be years before Merced or IA-64 processors are as significant as even Alpha is today. It's probably going to be 2002 before they get there, which is a long time in this business," Slater said.
Compaq is hoping to catch Intel in midstream during this transition, offering Alpha CPUs at least as powerful as Merced, with what the company will say are superior multiprocessing characteristics. Compaq will describe the EV7, aka 21364, at the forum. |
