Re: Too bad there are some (one?) who just don't understand the logic of early adoption. They will.
survivin,
Here's a little background on me.
I started interning with IBM my junior year of college. It was at this time IBM announced their copper chips. I had planned on exiting Minnesota after college, but was terrified of the job hunt. IBM offered me a job without me even applying or really doing a formal interview. I was eyeing Colorado, but IBM made an easy stress free choice for me. I had done 2 back to back summer sessions, so I took a few months off before starting work in the "real world". I started IBM in September of 1999. At this time, I didn't have much to do, there was a lot of prep work for Y2K going on. I took the time to read everything I could about IBM servers for a few reasons. One was that Scott McNealy continuously badmouthed and taunted IBM. The other was that I was intriuged about this new copper technology. During this time, I found out that the copper chips that were just starting to appear in the S80 were actually qualified 18 months earlier. On top of this, I learned just how far ahead of the competition IBM was in processor technology. A few times AMD came up, because they are really the only other player in PC/server processors that were moving to copper. While even IBM was admitting that copper on .25um was providing no advantage, it became clear that in the long run this strategy would pay off. IBM does $20 billion a quarter in revenue and isn't going to say or do anything that's going to get a big move out of the stock, but AMD is a whole different story at under a $10 billion market cap at the time. I started to look closely at AMD and the competition, Intel. From everything I could find, it looked like IBM was years ahead in copper technology. I knew Dresden was opening in a few months, so that's how I got turned on to AMD.
Look at these FACTS. IBM qualified copper and it still took them 18 months to get the chips in the S80 and 24 months to get them in the whole line of servers. Dresden was already 3 years in the making, a long time to get a fab online. Since I knew that Intel was a long ways away from copper, it just makes sense the transition to copper would not go smooth. I'm sure it will be easier for Intel than it was for AMD or IBM, but it will take time and not go smooth. AMD just looked like a solid bet.
In my opinion, IBM and AMD went to copper when they could. Intel has stated that they will go to copper when they need to, and I think they will pay dearly for this strategy. I think the best is yet to come from AMD
chic |
