Luke, you make some good points, but I think you are missing the fact that INTC is aware of trends in the PC market and trends in the IT market in general and is responding.
Examples:
IA-64 CPUs for the server market, competing head to head with SUNW, hopefully.
InfiniBand ASICS (and industry alliance leadership in setting standards) for an entirely new architecture of I/O for servers, PCs, and who knows what else.
StrongArm for process control, PDAs, games, cell phones, etc.
There are more examples, but I that pretty well exhausts my off-hand knowledge.
If the PC market is changing, not requiring so much CPU power, etc, then it will be AMD that suffers. They will be stuck in the 32-bit desktop nich (or with a 64 bit chip with a 32-bit mode that will hardly ever run in 64-bit mode). AMD is helping define the "commodity" nich of computing and will not be a threat to INTC in the "new" markets, where the margins will be good and the quantities will be even higher than the PC market was/is.
BTW, I own a CPQ with a Athlon 7 (700Mhz). I am using a cable modem. I am getting into digital photog. (Actually scanning in slides and negatives and working with them digitally.) I find the 700Mhz adequate, but I had rather run a P4 with twice the power. I can't wait for the new apps that will, no doubt, arise out of the new power of the P4. Voice recognition, for example. |
