Jim, >How big is this coveted server market anyway?
Pretty hard to figure that one out. Intel doesn't break out sales by product when they report to the outside world...yet. In the last CC, I believe they talked about starting to do something like that, but I think it was on major boundaries, or business units. So, Intel arch. vs. communications products vs. web hosting, that kind of stuff, I guess.
You could try to back into some numbers by looking at what the server companies sell. Compaq just announced $1.5 B in sales last quarter for their Industry Standard Server Group. Not every product in there has an Intel CPU (but probably the vast majority do), and some of the Intel CPUs are standard PIIIs, vs. small cache or large cache Xeons. Still, if it goes into a server, call it a server chip, Xeon or not. So, what percentage of the price of servers do the CPUs make up? Would be more in the smaller servers because they don't have as much disk storage, memory, or all the RAS stuff like hot plug PCI, power supplies, fans, etc. Maybe CPU is 25% in the smaller ones, 15% in the bigger ones, averaging 20% ?
So taking CPQ's 1.5B quarter out to a yearly basis:
1.5B X 4 quarters per year = 6B, but divide by 2 for markup = 3B.
20% of the server is assumed to be CPU chips: 3B X 20% = 600M from Compaq. Compaq has about 30% of overall X86 server market. 600M X 10/3 = $2B per year for server chips.
But, I think it's the fastest growing X86 segment (Compaq said they were up 40% YOY on the servers).
No WAGs in there of course! Don't quote me on any of these numbers. Take all of this with an amount of salt equal to what was consumed at Margaritaville in Capitola tonight.
Tony |
