JDN:
“It’s designed for the Internet,” said Doug Carmean, the engineer who led the Pentium 4 chip design. By this, he means it aims to work well with PCs connected to the Net. It will give Web surfers better graphics and audio performance, among other things, say Intel officials...
With due respect for your outstanding business acumen (which I agree with far more often than not), and with equal hesitancy to agree with anything written by the callow youth chic_hearn who is usually wrong and who, among other things, has written on the clown-killer thread that SUNW is going to be in "BIG, BIG trouble next year" <g>, I must say that the above quote from Intel is devoid of meaning.
If you'll recall, that quote is exactly, precisely the same thing they said about the Pentium III: it's going to improve your web surfing experience. Commercials of bunny-suiters and little girls entering the door to world-wide wonder locked to all those without a Pentium III, and so forth. Remember?
Chips alone don't improve web surfing experiences; complexes of things improve web surfing experiences, and most of these things are puny in comparison to plain old network bandwidth. When the Pentium III came out, Intel set its marketing weinies and weinettes to put up some phony websites where you could download some little cartoons that would rotate cubes on your screen a little faster if you had a pentium III, and so on. They also tried to talk various sites into putting up content that somehow "took advantage" of the Pentium III's few new instructions. The whole thing ended up as a pathetic joke. People use the Pentium III to read mail, recalculate spreadsheets and browse 99.999% static web pages. DSL helps the average user look at more porn shots per minute. The Pentium III doesn't.
Meanwhile, the 900Mhz AMD Athlon Thunderbird is the best PC chip deal ever to come on the market by leaps and bounds. I wouldn't build a machine with a Pentium III in it now; there's simply no reason to.
Intel is the one that's going to be in BIG, BIG trouble next year.
Yours in respectful disagreement,
--QS |
