DRBES, it's fun and everything, but don't underrate Intel. An amazing thing, nobody but Intel could survive the Rambus fiasco, going on 6 months? now. Intel is thriving, despite it. The server customers want SDRAM, but the desktop customers really, really, really want to pay 5x as much for their memory, with negligible performance improvement to show for it.
I'm sure most companies that deal with Intel on a high level don't particularly enjoy the dealings, but nobody's walking away from them either. My understanding is that to avoid the horse head in the bed syndrome, the OEMs can sell AMD boxes with Win98, but NT/Win2k is verboten. A spot check at the gateway web site confirmed that for them, anyway. NT is listed as an option on the low end Celeron systems, but not with the Athlon systems. Compare, for example, gatewayatwork.com and gatewayatwork.com . Look for the head of the software list, under operating system, the &979 Celery system has options there, the $2129 Athlon system doesn't.
Which is a problem for AMD, I doubt any sizable business is going to put Win98 on new desktops anymore. And the problem isn't that the Athlon can't run NT.
Cheers, Dan. |
